The Aesthetic of Place in the American Play-Cycle

Home , A Texas Trilogy, Big White Fog, Jitney (play), Lanford Wilson, The Kentucky Cycle, Tony Kushner

THE AESTHETIC OF PLACE IN THE AMERICAN PLAY-CYCLE

Erin Lea Naler

APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

______R. Clay Reynolds, Chair

______Fred Curchack

______Jessica C. Murphy

______Marilyn Waligore

Erin Lea Naler

to my father for the taste of land and the gift of place

THE AESTHETIC OF PLACE IN THE AMERICAN PLAY-CYCLE

ERIN LEA NALER, BS, MA

DISSERTATION

Presented to the Faculty of

The University of Texas at Dallas

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN

HUMANITIES—AESTHETIC STUDIES

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS

May 2017

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been honored to work with many artists and scholars who have poured their time and talent into my life, resulting in this study of community. Before all things this is an artifact of the places that have provided me a community—sometimes nurturing, sometimes chaotic, but always beautiful. To my artist community—who taught me to embrace fear and failure. To my family—who taught me to live abundantly in tension at the border of the city and the field. To my faith community—whose generosity has no edge. To the scholars who helped me see, my teachers and committee members, Marilyn Waligore, Fred Curchack, and Jessica Murphy. And most importantly to Clay Reynolds who taught me to write and helped me find my voice.

October 2016

THE AESTHETIC OF PLACE IN THE AMERICAN PLAY-CYCLE

Publication No. ______

Erin Lea Naler, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2017

ABSTRACT

Supervising Professor: Dr. R. Clay Reynolds

Playwrights of the American play-cycle represent their characters’ displacement and attempt to cure that displacement through a return to a rootedness in place. The play-cycle form demonstrates a unique theatre narrative that insists on an aesthetic of place. The play-cycle is viewed through contemporary American agrarian writers concerned with rootedness in place, Yi-

Fu Tuan’s geographic explorations of space and place, and Edward S. Casey’s seminal philosophical discussion of place as the primary experience of human identity. August Wilson’s

Pittsburgh Cycle—ten decades of the African American experience in Pittsburg’s Hill District— demonstrates the place-making effects of food. While Horton Foote uses built structures to place his characters in their Costal Plains town of Harrison, Texas, in The Orphan’s Home Cycle.

Because the play-cycle performance is intended to require an extended embodied commitment to a locale by an audience and performer community, the form suits Yi-Fu Tuan’s dictum “place is pause.” The theatre that rises out of this pause-inducing form both compels a place narrative and attempts to cure audience displacement creating an encompassing aesthetic of place.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...... v

Abstract ...... vi

Chapter 1 In The First Place ...... 1

Chapter 2 Sessions of Emplacement in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle ...... 35

Chapter 3 Localized Caring in Horton Foote’s The Orphans’ Home Cycle ...... 115

Chapter 4 Coming Full Circle: The Play-Cycle Comes Into Place ...... 182

Works Cited ...... 192

Biographical Sketch ...... 201

Curriculum Vitae

vii

CHAPTER 1

IN THE FIRST PLACE

In the first place there is depth. Primal depth, at once constituted and discovered by body, yields places. Places, gathered into a detotalized totality, yield world. Neither space nor time—nor universe—issues from these origins, except by way of abstraction and attenuation. Only a misplaced, or more exactly an unplaced, concreteness leads to such universalist terms, as consistent as they are superficial. But an implaced concreteness, bodily bound, engenders a world in depth.

To be in the world, to be situated at all, is to be in place.

—Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World

Stark Young, a mid-century theatre critic, introduces an aesthetic of the optimum and local when he observes that “significant” theatre is not limited to a global, prescriptive form, but takes on an optimum form (old or new, traditional or experimental) that best suits the artistic impulse of the playwright (Theatre 58). The form does not exist to be fleshed out with a plot, but rather the plot dictates the form of the drama: “It follows then that the supreme thing in the theatre is the arrival of a work of art in which we perceive that an idea has found a theatrical body to bring it into existence. The more significant the idea the more significant the work of art” (58). The form of the play-cycle in the American theatre is not just an extended attempt at storytelling; rather, following Young’s suggestion, it is the optimum form for the playwright’s artistic impulse—an impulse that seeks a connection to place.

1 2

The play-cycle’s form is well represented in the western theatre: beginning with the

Greeks (the Theban cycle, the Oresteia), the English mystery plays (York Cycle, Wakefield

Cycle, Chester Cycle, N-Town Cycle), William Shakespeare’s Henriad, W. B. Yeats’ Cuchulain

Cycle of the Irish Literary Renaissance, and the American play-cycle, with notable examples in

August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle (or Century Cycle) and Horton Foote’s The Orphans’ Home

Cycle. Flourishing after the explosion of modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century, the play-cycle of the American theatre is a critical and unique development of the cycle form, themes, and portrayal of place. Rather than contributing further to the modernist movement in the American theater represented by Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920), Susan

Glaspell’s The Verge (1921), Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal (1928), or Elmer Rice’s The Adding

Machine (1923), the play-cycle represents a decidedly antimodern reaction to modern displacement.

In 1952, Joseph Wood Krutch gave a series of lectures at Cornell University on the advent of modernism in the theatre. In his lecture, published as “Modernism” in Modern Drama, he identified Henrick Ibsen as the playwright who popularly introduced modernism in the drama—a claim that anyone who has read an introductory theatre history textbook would recognize. For Krutch, Ibsen’s modernism, while not the first example in drama, was the most widely seen and read.1 Nora’s final door slam in A Doll’s House signaled a break with the past— a chasm appeared in time that cut off continuity between the past and the future: “Thereafter the concept of the past as the enemy of the future and of the present, the conviction that we must

1 Krutch acknowledges that while not the first to introduce modernism, “Ibsen was the first fully effective exponent of the idea, he did not either invent it or even first introduce it into the drama” (6).

3 attempt some sort of difficult leap across the chasm which separated the two, became a dominant idea, almost an obsession” (6). George Bernard Shaw affirmed Ibsen’s modernity, which showed a discontinuity with the past, in his book The Quintessence of Ibsenism, published for the first time in 1891 and reissued with a new Preface and additional chapters in 1913, thirty-four years after the premier of A Doll’s House. Ibsen’s plays are part of a body of European art that “now form a Bible far surpassing in importance to us the ancient Hebrew Bible that has served us so long. . . . I think Ibsen has proved the right of the drama to take scriptural rank, and his own right canonical rank as one of the major prophets of the modern Bible” (50). According to Shaw,

Ibsen’s drama represents a break with past sacred texts, forming a new modern sacred text that will guide humanity into the future.

Krutch, however, identifies a group of early twentieth-century playwrights who were continuously negotiating this chasm between the past and the future—some of whom didn’t write narratives of discontinuity, but wrote narratives that identified the chasm while, at the same time, suggested a need to retain continuity with the past. He called these playwrights antimodernists. In a variety of ways they pulled from the past in order to find a path to humanity’s success in the future. He identifies several playwrights from the Irish Literary

Renaissance as antimodernists because of their “avowed . . . resistance to naturalism and to the dominance of Ibsen” (93). John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and Lady Gregory were concerned with reviving their regional folk culture as a way to speak to moderns—art “is essentially national with its roots in a folk culture . . . every writer should put his roots down in his own country and draw his strength from the spirit of his race” (94). Krutch makes the claim

4 that “the Abbey Theatre was founded as an antimodernist movement and that in Synge it found a playwright who successfully detached himself from what was called ‘the modern drama’” (97).

Like the Irish, Anton Chekhov exhibited characteristics of an antimodernist in Krutch’s program. While The Cherry Orchard “ends with a dilemma,” a feature of modernism, Chekhov is not entirely pleased with the eradication of the past: “This is the first time that we have met the admission that the past is not merely something to grow away from, that something in itself worth having may be left behind when and if we cross the chasm” (72, 73). For Chekhov, when

Ibsen crossed the chasm something was lost, but returning to the past would be utter foolishness because “what absorbed him was not the future but the present” (71). Chekhov’s antimodernism is not a nostalgic longing for a past time or place, but an acknowledgement that something essential was lost in Ibsen’s chasm—Chekhov’s dictum is, instead, a resignation: “The thing is both good and bad. No doubt it had to happen” (73).

Krutch similarly locates antimodernism in the plays of American playwrights Eugene

O’Neill and Maxwell Anderson because of their adherence to the traditional tragic form and use of verse:

I rest my case for O’Neill and Anderson as modern American playwrights who

are antimodernists not only upon the fact that both see the traditional form of

tragedy as in itself a significant comment on a world which has lost its sense of

human dignity but also upon the fact that both chose as the most important theme

of their tragedies man’s persistent desire to be noble in a sense which one

dominant kind of rationalism insists does not really make sense. (123)

What Krutch’s antimodernists have in common is a refusal to accept a discontinuity with the past. The Irish, in particular, are deeply concerned with their connection to place and how that propels them into the future.

Jackson Lears, a scholar of American modernity, in his book No Place of Grace:

Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920 explores the antimodern response to American fin de siècle modernity. Lears suggests that antimodernists of the early twentieth century reacted to the modernist exaltation of

the systematic organization of economic life for maximum productivity and of

individual life for maximum personal achievement; the drive for efficient control

of nature under the banner of improving human welfare; the reduction of the

world to a disenchanted object to be manipulated by rational technique. (7)

They were searching for a deeper reality that would cure them from a culture that “had become not only overcivilized but also curiously unreal” (5).2 Modern culture valued the “self-made man” of capitalism and the incessant movement of industrialism: “Autonomous achievement required perpetual motion; the modern self never stood still” (18). They were, in a word, displaced. But antimodernism attempted to stop the displacing motion of modern life—to pause in community while “the rationalizing elites . . . remain[ed] obsessed with efficient productivity at the expense of satisfying labor and humane community” (95). While antimodernism took many forms—in the same way modernism took many forms—they were as a whole best

2 Ironically, Shaw suggests that Ibsen’s Nora was seeking reality as well when she slammed the door: “So she leaves him then and there and goes out into the real world to find out its reality for herself, and to gain some position not fundamentally false, refusing to see her children again until she is fit to be in charge of them, or to live with him until she and he become capable of a more honorable relation to one another” (Quintessence 22).

6 identified by their search for “authentic experience, physical or spiritual” by acknowledging their spiritual displacement resulting from inauthenticity and discontinuity with the past (91). The result was a “characteristic antimodern blend of accommodation and protest” that allowed for their progressive concerns to be tempered by a renewed spirituality and an acknowledgement that the past could not be abandoned in order to succeed in the future (65).

The American play-cycle, then, is an antimodern “accommodation and protest” of the industrial mythology of American place. The play-cycle’s push-and-pull relationship with modernity manifests itself as the rejection of aggressive autonomy, the denial of neutral and unlimited space, the critique of unexamined industrial advancement, the validation of regionalism and local culture, the refusal of idyllic pastoral stereotypes, and the centralization of communities, peoples, and rituals of the American people.

The most well-known play-cycles of the American theatre are set in culturally influential urban areas of the eastern costal region: Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (Boston,

1931), Robert Lowell’s The Old Glory (in and around Massachusetts and on an American ship off the coast of Trinidad, 1964), Israel Horovitz’s The Wakefield Plays (Wakefield,

Massachusetts, 1974-79), August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle (ten decades in Pittsburgh, 1982-

2005), and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (New York and Salt Lake City, 1993).3 Although there are notable play-cycles that represent American places from coast to coast, play-cycles of the American interior—Middle West, Great Plains, Appalachian Mountains, and Coastal

Plains—are often left unexplored in what little scholarship centers on the American play-cycle.

3 August Wilson’s play-cycle includes one play (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) set outside of Pittsburgh in Chicago.

The only notable exceptions are Horton Foote’s The Orphans’ Home Cycle and Robert

Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle, which have received more developed scholarly treatments.4

Play-cycles of the American interior include Virgil Geddes’ Native Ground: A Cycle of

Plays (1932) set in the Dakotas; Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play (2005) set in England, Germany, and

Spearfish, South Dakota; Preston Jones’ A Texas Trilogy (1973-74) set in west Texas; Lanford

Wilson’s The Talley Trilogy (1978-85) set in the Missouri Ozarks; Robert Schenkkan’s The

Kentucky Cycle (1991) set in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky; Horton Foote’s The

Orphans’ Home Cycle (1962-99) set in the fictitious Coastal Plains town of Harrison, Texas;

David Wright Carpenter’s Harvest: A Texas High Plains Trilogy (2005) set in the Texas panhandle; and (most recently) Suzan-Lori Parks’ Father Comes Home from the Wars (2015) set in west Texas. Despite their number, play-cycles of both the American interior and coasts remain relatively unexplored in theatre scholarship. For such a foundational literary and theatrical form

(both in western theatre and abroad), it is surprising that so little developed scholarship exists.

There is simply no integrated study of American play-cycles and very little study of individual play-cycles.5 Laurin Porter’s discussion of Foote’s Cycle in Orphans’ Home: The Voice and

Vision of Horton Foote (2003); Alan Nadel’s two-volume edited essays on Wilson’s play-cycle,

May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson (1994) and August

4 The most notable being Laurin Porter's 2003 book, Orphans' Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote, and John Middlesworth's 2000 dissertation, The Epic Tradition in Contemporary Drama: Robert Schenkkan, August Wilson, and Tony Kushner. 5 Robert J. Andreach’s 2012 book on the American dramatic trilogy, The Contemporary American Dramatic Trilogy: A Critical Study, is a valuable resource, but is limited to dramatic "triptychs" in the American theatre (some of which are contrived as trilogies by the author) that are located on the east and west coasts. He contributes very little interpretive insight into the trilogies from the interior.

Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle (2010), as well as Harry J. Elam’s The Past As

Present in the Drama of August Wilson; and Deborah R. Geis’ edited essays on Kushner’s epic,

Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America (1998), are the most significant, large-scale, published discussions of individual American play-cycles. If there is to be an increased exploration of this integral American theatre form, a more robust discussion of the play-cycle form and its essential connection to American place must occur.

Despite the evident absence of broad scholarly treatment of American play-cycles, Julie

Sparks has written an important essay defining the form. She provides a clarifying and workable definition of what constitutes a play-cycle in her 2005 article, “Playwright’s Progress: The

Evolution of the Play Cycle, from Shaw’s Pentateuch to Angels in America.” To develop her definition she draws upon classic examples from ancient western theatre (the Oresteia, the

Theban cycle), medieval mystery cycles, modernist Shavian and Ibsen cycles, and contemporary, popular American cycles (The Kentucky Cycle and Angels in America). Her broad definition provides some useful parameters: “The term ‘play cycle’ can be applied to any group of plays that are seen, by either the writer or a director, to be unified by theme, whether or not they ever were or will be performed as a unit” (181). In Sparks’ definition a play-cycle, in the most general sense, is determined to be so by the number of plays the cycle contains (more than one) and its unified theme. It may or may not be expressly written as a play-cycle by the playwright but might be cobbled together by a director or scholar into a unified whole.6 Sparks’ narrower definition provides even greater elucidation of the form:

6 An example of a play-cycle organized by a scholar is Brian Johnston’s The Ibsen Cycle, in which the author organizes Ibsen’s plays into a unified whole. This grouping likely had its origins in Shaw’s discussion of Ibsen’s

A play cycle comprises two or more plays that are meant to be performed as a

unit, either in an unusually long single performance or over a few days. These

plays are usually connected in theme, style, and plot, usually with at least some of

the characters appearing in two or more of the plays or being represented in later

plays by their descendants. These cycles often focus on the history of an extended

family, as do the Oresteia and the Theban plays, or they represent more broadly

the history of a culture or of the human race, as do the medieval mystery plays.

(181)

In a more specific sense, play-cycles are defined by the time it takes to perform them, their narrative, character development, and subject matter—they tell the grand narrative of a family or a culture. According to Sparks, both their form and content are taken from the epic stories that tell the development of a culture and family through time.

Sparks further develops her argument about the connections between the classic and medieval mystery play-cycles and the contemporary play-cycle by identifying the important defining characteristics that connect them over time. First, the traditional and the contemporary

work in The Quintessence of Ibsenism where Shaw states: “The plays should, like Wagner’s Ring, be performed in cycles; so that Ibsen may hunt you down from position to position until you are finally cornered” (50). Sam Shepard’s Family Trilogy is also an example of a play-cycle conceived of as a whole by someone other than the playwright. His plays Curse of the Starving Class (1976), Buried Child (1979), and True West (1980) have been organized into a trilogy, while some scholars add Fool for Love (1983) and A Lie of the Mind (1985) to form a quintet. In 1986 Rodney Simard wrote an essay in The Theatre Annual titled “American Gothic: Sam Shepard’s Family Trilogy” in which he argued for a shift in dramatic construction in Shepard’s plays from surrealism to “a more traditionally realistic style” (21). Simard argues for the three plays as a trilogy—with a potential fourth in the play Shepard had just written at the time of Simard’s publication, Fool for Love—that “indicates that the displaced man creates himself existentially, and any salvation to be found in a fragmented and technological world is within, not in the materialistic existence of things” (35). For Simard, the play-cycle is formed in the dramatic development of Shepard’s plays from surrealism to a “framework” of “objective reality” juxtaposed with the “chaos and confusion” of the displaced human (21, 35). The plays are held together as a whole by his growing aesthetic.

10 play-cycle are both concerned with significant cultural, sacred, folk, and mythical figures— characters of “universal significance” (182). Second, ancient and contemporary play-cycles attempt to “grapple with timeless human concerns” (182). Although play-cycles may contain moments of comedy, they are primarily used for a “serious civic purpose” and “to enlighten” the culture about its collective deficiencies—their “serious cultural purpose” is one of the most important characteristics that sets them apart from a conventional single play (182). Finally, play-cycles require a festival performance. For a play-cycle to exist in space, the venue itself must exist for the performance—for example, the Dionysian festivals or the churches and town squares of medieval Europe (182).

In his 2012 work on the American trilogy, Robert J. Andreach provides a less detailed definition of multi-play works: “Tripartite works in which the segments are progressively developed. . . . A trilogy is developed not merely thematically but dramatically” (4-5). Although his book specifically addresses American theatre works that appear as trilogies (a word he uses interchangeably with play-cycle) and lacks the detail of Sparks’ definition, he adds an important element to the definition of the multi-play work: they don’t only develop thematically (content), but also develop dramatically (form). The narrative isn’t simply a long-form miniseries in which the characters reappear and develop through time, but the plays must be linked dramatically—

“The drama must build through the segments connecting them” (4). Andreach’s definition doesn’t require that this development be linear in time, with the last play providing a satisfying resolution, but requires that something occurs in the form of the drama that completes the play- cycle. The plays function together as a dramatic whole.

V. A. Kolve comes to the same conclusion in his study of the medieval Corpus Christi cycle, The Play Called Corpus Christi. While the creative impulse behind the medieval mystery play-cycles is religious—to make a “quike bookis” out of the “triad” of the biblical narrative:

“first things, last things, and the life of Christ between”—more importantly, the form was developed to depict “a single coherent dramatic intent” (5, 53, 50). The individual plays in the

Corpus Christi cycle are capable of standing alone (The Second Shepherd’s Play is the most notable example) in the same way the plays of the Theban cycle are most often produced alone.

As a body the plays themselves are part of a larger dramatic structure that is only identifiable by viewing the plays together as a whole.

In general, there is little discussion of the play-cycle form in theatre scholarship even though it has existed since the ancient Greek theatre. Bernard Knox glosses over any defining characteristics of the play-cycle in his introduction to the Theban plays, and instead focuses on the translation and the plot.7 David Grene and Richard Lattimore barely even acknowledge

Aeschylus’ Oresteia as a play-cycle in their introduction to the work. Their most important contribution is to briefly connect the cycle of plays to their origin in the earlier “Epic Cycle” of tales about Troy and Thebes (5). David Bevington, in his comprehensive volume of medieval drama, nearly skips over any discussion of the impetus and character of the play-cycle form

7 Scholar Bernard Knox disagrees with the common classification of the Theban plays as a play-cycle (or even a trilogy—he uses the terms interchangeably in the same manner as Andreach). In his introduction to the Theban plays, he places them in the order they were written rather than their chronological order. He argues they are simply three plays that deal with different actions in the same myth and, as a result, simply share characters— “each play is a completely independent unit and in fact, though a character may appear in all three (Creon, for example) the point of view from which he is seen differs from one play to another.” He contends that the plays don’t share any of the characteristics of the play-cycle as defined by Julie Sparks except the characters’ repetition. While the argument of his essay is certainly compelling, Sparks’ definition offers equally compelling reasons to consider them as a play-cycle (Knox 30).

12 except to say, “As the word ‘cycle’ suggests, these dramas were comprehensive in scope, usually extending from the Fall of Lucifer to the Last Judgment” (227). Bevington suggests that the only reason the medieval plays are defined as play-cycles is because their narrative covers an extended scope of time. Brian Johnston’s ground-breaking exploration of Henrick Ibsen’s plays,

The Ibsen Cycle, connects twelve of the modern dramatist’s plays into a play-cycle linked by

“one great intellectual structure available to Ibsen in the nineteenth century: the philosophical system of Hegel” (1). Johnston’s organizing system is one of “worldview” (4). Alan Nadel, in the introduction to his edited book of essays on August Wilson’s play-cycle, August Wilson:

Completing the Twentieth Century Cycle, fails to go far enough in his definition of the form. He simply states that the last five plays of the play-cycle “provide an overall shape that converts the cycle from an anthology to a loosely structured epic” (2). This is as far as he takes his discussion of Wilson’s play-cycle as a whole work of theatre art. A holistic discussion might be of little concern to Nadel because to discuss and belabor the form would distract from the content and performance history that occupies his two volumes.

Eugene O’Neill, who attempted to write an eleven-play cycle about “the corrupting influence of material things upon” the American family titled A Tale of Possessors Self-

Dispossessed, eventually gave up on the project and burned the documents prior to his death because he found that connecting the individual plays of the play-cycle too daunting (Gallup 1).

O’Neill faced the challenge of writing a play that is “complete in itself while at the same time an indispensable link in the whole” while writing his play-cycle (5). This frustration caused him to eventually abandon the project altogether. His abandonment of the creative venture suggests that the form of the play-cycle itself is neither easily defined nor easily executed (5). Both its form

13 and content are extensive and complex, and both must be linked together aesthetically to create a dramatic whole.

Because of this lacuna in definitions and the sheer scope of the form and content of the

American play-cycle, Julie Sparks and Robert J. Andreach are important contributors to the definition of the form. Although Sparks’ definition appears to be comprehensive—and it is the most comprehensive in the existing discussions—both she and Andreach leave out a critical defining feature of the play-cycle: that of place. While Sparks acknowledges that the play-cycle requires a special kind of theatre space to produce a performance, the aesthetic of place is of no interest to her. The only place requirement is an event that creates a willing audience and provides the space and time in which to produce the play-cycle.

Is it necessary, then, to significantly amend or further Sparks’ definition? Or is it adequate enough, with the simple addition of place, to articulate the aesthetic parameters of the form? I believe that a cohesive/connective aesthetic of place is a far more important matter than can be rectified by a simple addition to the existing definition. Sparks’ study is based in the history of the Greek and European play-cycle form, and while her historical approach to the form is valuable as foundational material, she then applies that form to the American play-cycle without acknowledging there might be critical differences and developments of the play-cycle form in the American theatre. The American play-cycle seems to demonstrate a stronger connection to place—a point both she and Andreach entirely overlook in their work. Place is such an important feature of the American play-cycle that it merits further study.

Edward S. Casey provides an important articulation of what constitutes place-making in his comprehensive study of place, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. His primary defense of this enormous feat of scholarship is the importance of a revived understanding of how late modernity with its “incessant motion” has left us wanting to

“linger . . . in one particular place to savor its unique qualities and its local history” (xiii). We are hungry for place. The cause of which, according to Casey, is the “displacement” of modernity:

In the past thee centuries in the West—the period of “modernity”—place has

come to be not only neglected but actively suppressed. Owing to the triumph of

the natural and social sciences in this same period, any serious talk of place has

been regarded as regressive or trivial. A discourse has emerged whose exclusive

cosmological foci are Time and Space. When the two were combined by

twentieth-century physicists into the amalgam “space-time,” the overlooking of

place was only continued by other means. For an entire epoch, place has been

regarded as an impoverished second cousin of Time and Space, those two colossal

cosmic partners that tower over modernity. (xiv)

While our late modern displacement is caused by the “alienation and violence” of modernity, the cure is “distinctively premodern in inspiration”: an antimodern protest against displacement—

Casey’s “implacement” (xiv). Tom Driver observes a similar late modern displacement in 1968 that comes as a result of the growing “technopolis” (462).8 American cities, as hegemonic

8 Tom Driver appropriates the neologism describing the modern city as a “fusion of technological and political components” from Harvey Cox’s 1965 book The Secular City. Cox coins the term to describe the modern city that could only emerge from abundant and rapidly accelerating technology—“a new species of human community” that differs from the previous epochs of the tribe and the town. The technopolis is a space of glass and steel, rapid

15 centers of culture making, affect where we situate place in our aesthetics. Driver proposes that there is a decline of place in the modern (one might even say industrial) theatre: “Technopolis is anti-histrionic because technology destroys space. . . . Technology renders all space the same tending to neutralize the meaning of space. It erodes the meaningfulness of particular places”

(462-63). An aesthetic of place in the theatre (the concern of Stark Young and Driver) experienced a decline in the twentieth century because, in the technopolis, the “cluster” (where one incessantly moves to collect the artifacts of industrial life) is superior to place (a fixed area where one pauses), and so displaces the human who is the locus of place (463). Because theatre

“is the art of the use of finite space,” which “requires a space that does not move, that is fixed and limited, that imposes restraints,” where artists collaboratively create a place for the human narrative to be embodied, it stands to reason that the technopolis is hostile to the theatre because it is hostile to place—we must, therefore, find a renewed aesthetic of place in order to cure our late modern displacement (463). In order to reorient ourselves in a placeless world, Casey proposes to “accord to place a position of renewed respect by specifying its power to direct and stabilize us, to memorialize and identify us, to tell us who and what we are in terms of where we are” (xv). Both Casey and Driver propose that late moderns are in need of an antimodern reaction to the prioritization of time and space that will emplace us in order to cure our chronic displacement.

Casey suggests that “place-awareness” as a cure to displacement is on the rise due to a few salient features of our time: “globalization, screen and video culture, and the effects of

movement and communication, data and numbers. In the technology-driven city, place is in constant jeopardy (Cox 5-6).

16 forced migration” (xxii). The aesthetic of the theatre offers a unique way to cure our chronic late modern displacement born out of the disembodiment and loss of specificity endemic to globalization, technology, and migration. Marvin Carlson in his book Places of Performance:

The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture shows how “the Greek theatre, like the agora and gymnasium, was an essential unit in the urban model, an inevitable, accessible, and highly visible element in any Greek city worthy of the name” (62). In images, the Greek theatre place is shown as a circular hub situated on the margin or center of town. What is most telling about the images, however, is that the concentric theatre is placed within a grid of city streets.9 The theatre place stands out as the only circular locale in the midst of a linear landscape—a locale determined by the natural sloping shape of the landscape that would accommodate the circular playing area (the orchestra) and the half-moon shaped, ringed seating that would accommodate the audience (the theatron). The theatron, literally a “place for seeing,” was often a place not only to see the drama, but also a place to see the rest of the city. One imagines the audience arriving from the linear streets of the city being drawn into the theatron where they are invited to see down into the concentric center where the Chorus danced and sang in front of the city beyond. Our contemporary theatre structure functions in much the same way by concentrically

9 In a following chapter on Foote’s The Orphans’ Home Cycle I will discuss the differences between hermetic (linear) and hestial (concentric) spaces as defining two ways to dwell in place. These two ways of dwelling are required to be emplaced—one allows for the other. For example, in the Greek culture one would go to the concentric theatre (hestial) to experience katharsis—a Greek medical term describing a homeopathic purgation of pity and fear (Carlson, Theories 18). This medical purification brought about by katharsis would allow the spectator to reenter the linear cityscape (hermetic) and function more successfully as a citizen of the Republic. Carlson details the various interpretations of katharsis over time. While he proposes that the Greeks would have viewed the theatre as a place of medical purgation, the neoclassical interpretation is of moral purification, and a modern interpretation is “intellectual enlightenment” or “clarification” (18). Whatever the case may be, Carlson concludes that katharsis is “a beneficial, uplifting experience, whether psychological, moral, intellectual, or some combination of these” (19). Any of these affects of the theatre would certainly provide the audience a way to reenter society—even if the effect is to question the very structure of society, as is the result of katharsis in Sam Shepard’s Family Trilogy.

17 drawing the audience to see into the center—the narrative, actors, lighting, scene design, costumes, and movement all draw the audience toward the theatre event pulling their focus to the center. In the Greek cityscape, the theatre facilitated communal, concentric dwelling in its architecture and location within the linear grid of the city—the theatre created place. The modern-day theatre accomplishes much the same thing.

Unfolding an aesthetic of place as a corrective of displacement in the American play- cycle provides an entrance into the function of place in other American art-cycles. Furthering

Sparks’ definition is of value to this larger discussion of the creative impulse of the cycle— whether it be a play-cycle or another kind of cycle that appears in the novel, film, photograph, painting, or music. Exploring what manifests itself as a cycle in one artistic form can provide a more thorough understanding of what occurs in another. Stark Young’s observations about the interconnectivity of the arts and body seem salient:

If we see a work of art and do not feel the life in it passing into us, restated in

terms of our natures or ideas or acts, we can hardly be said to have seen it at all;

we have not responded to it. We have missed its content, which is there to be

received; for the life in it is not strange to the life in us. St. Paul saying that we

live in one flesh—ἐν τῷ σώµᾳ—is not alone true of human beings but of men and

the arts as well, they are parts of one another's bodies. (Theatre 31)

Extending the definition of the cycle demonstrates aesthetic reiterations that occur in other art forms, providing a renewed entrance into a variety of art-texts. This synthesis of art-texts is foundational to the cycle form—it allows for a synthesis of narratives resulting in a renewed, more complex, deeply-rooted narrative.

In order to propose a more thorough definition of the cycle that can appear in any artistic form, the cycle must be distinguished from a multi-part work, sometimes called a series. Multi- part works exist in a variety of artistic forms: the Old and New Testaments of the Bible;

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron; Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle; J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy; Baz Lurhman’s Red Curtain Trilogy Strictly

Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, and Moulin Rouge!; Russell Lee’s Pie Town, New Mexico, documentary photographs; Andrew Wyeth’s paintings of his hometown of Chadds Ford,

Pennsylvania; and even the indie folk-band Lord Huron’s 2015 album Strange Trails—a body of western songs and accompanying short films. While several of these multi-part works might be considered a cycle, it a simplification of their multi-part characteristic to classify all of them as cycles. Kolve’s identification of a cycle’s unique “completeness” and single unified dramatic purpose helps differentiate between a cycle and a series (or any group of connected art narratives) (50). The single parts of a cycle tell their own narrative, but the cumulative narrative of all the parts working together also tell its own complete narrative. And the narrative and purpose of a single part might differ from the narrative and purpose of the entire cycle. For example, it would be a stretch to call all twenty seasons of Law and Order a cycle simply because it is a multi-part work—the twenty-year narrative doesn’t contain a single dramatic purpose that dramatically holds the parts together. It is better identified as a series because every episode of all twenty seasons is not necessary to tell the complete unified dramatic narrative.

Russell Lee’s photographs of Pie Town, however, could be identified as a cycle because while individual photographs have their own unique narratives and aesthetics, when combined they tell a complex and unified narrative of a town, a people, and a landscape in the high New Mexico

19 desert. Most importantly they are unified by place and how the place’s complex but unified narrative is told through photographs of the community, the member’s relationships to one another, and their relationship to the land.

Kolve identifies an important difference between the earlier Latin and English liturgical dramas performed in the medieval church and the vernacular play-cycles that followed that shed light on the classification of a play-cycle and its unique connection to place. The former were

“sequences” (series, perhaps?) while the later developed into the play-cycle (35). His reasoning is that liturgical dramas were “firmly anchored to their proper liturgical season” (they were performed with their corresponding liturgical event), and they were not complete without their connection to the religious calendar—they were bound to time (35). As “ornamental” embellishments to the church’s liturgical calendar, they couldn’t dramatically stand alone without their context in time (44). The Corpus Christi cycle, however, is dramatically complete—it supplies its own context (44). What differentiates the play-cycle from the sequence in medieval drama is that the play-cycle makes its own place. It is not dependent upon the church’s liturgical calendar or the church building to have a place for performance, and it is dramatically complete without the liturgical season. It is not bound to a specific time, instead it makes its own place. Kolve points out that the place (platae) of the Corpus Christi cycle was the town itself: the “streets and open places” (23). Whereas the sequence of the liturgical drama depended upon the calendar, the Corpus Christi cycle depended upon the town itself (the place)—“action itself told the story, and it happened there in England, in front of and amid the

20 spectators” (23).10 This difference between the liturgical, calendar-bound theatre and the vernacular, place-making theatre helps to narrow the definition, and also puts greater significance on the role of place in the genesis of the play-cycle.

A play-cycle is a multi-part work that is either conceived of as a group by its author or is collected into a group by an outside artist; the parts are usually connected thematically and dramatically; the content and the form are inseparable; it tells the narrative of a people, time, or a place; it requires an extended time and/or place in which to tell the narrative; and it necessarily contains repetitions. The first point of this definition is taken from Sparks’ essay and seems to be the most obvious—a play-cycle is a multi-part work. An individual part of the multi-part work, however, may be capable of standing alone because it has its own internal integrity, but it is more fully realized through its external connection to the whole. The discrete parts of the work may be gathered into a whole by the author/creator, but (as in Sparks’ definition) may also be conceived of as a whole by an outside source—director, scholar, or curator.

Andreach’s addition of necessary dramatic development throughout the multi-part work is an important one because it introduces form as a unifying element, but it also suggests that the shape of the form (the drama) unfolds the narrative and theme. Another important feature of his inclusion of dramatic connectivity is that the play-cycle’s narrative doesn’t need to develop in linear time or form, but it might also explore the form in a variety of ways. Andreach rightly

10 Kolve references Richard Southern’s scholarship on the use of the term “place” in medieval drama: “the ‘place’ was simply the area in front of the stage or scaffold, to which the actors might descend if necessary. It was never geographically localized, and there was no pretense that what went on there went on in an imagined locality relevant to the action. . . . In Southern’s words, ‘It was not until the Italian Renaissance that the place of a performance could become attired in costume like an actor and take part in the drama—and scenery was born’” (23). Based upon this usage, Kolve suggests that the medieval play-cycle’s acknowledgement of the place as the theatre itself (the city streets) is the origin of Brecht, Ionesco, and Beckett’s principle concern with the same: “the cycles give us the thing itself in its first flowering” (23).

21 observes that the linear development of “narrative with a resolution ending in closure” is no longer indicative of the contemporary theatre; however, he is concerned that the parts “build” the drama as they unfold (4). The form and the narrative are connected.

The inseparability of content and form in the play-cycle is an addition to the existing definitions. Theatre scholar Martin Esslin and agrarian theatre scholar Stark Young write similarly when deemphasizing a separation between the two.11 Esslin argues that dividing content and form results in a weakened analysis of performance. The cohesion of content and form creates complex meaning: “Form determines content and content form and a change of form alters the content, and a change of content requires a different form to express it” (Esslin

16). Stark Young’s observations in 1927 are familiar: idea dictates form, and form, idea—

“Within every content, worthless or notable, is implied its form” (Theatre 50). Form and content cycle and recycle. Young is disinterested in dramatic formulas in the same way Esslin is—“No not to any given formulas” (50). Instead he is concerned with the fitness of content and form.

11 Both Esslin and Young are critical of Aristotle’s concern with unity, and both suggest that Aristotle proposed a system of rules for tragedy that must be followed absolutely. Aristotle, however, in the seventh chapter of his Poetics proposes a unity of form and content that Esslin and Young also propose. Aristotle makes it clear that the plot must fit the content: “Whatever length is required for a change to occur from bad fortune to good or from good fortune to bad through a series of incidents that are in accordance with probability or necessity, is a sufficient limit of magnitude” (Aristotle 15). The form of the drama—the plot (among other things)—must suit the action: “A plot, since it is an imitation of an action, must be an imitation of an action that is one and whole. Moreover, it is necessary that the parts of the action must be put together in such a way that if any one part is transposed or removed, the whole will be disordered and disunified. For that whose presence or absence has no evident effect is no part of the whole” (16). Marvin Carlson in his essential handbook on the development of theory in the theatre, Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present, suggests that it wasn’t until the neoclassical critics interpreted the Poetics that Aristotle was deemed “a prescriptive rule-maker”—Carlson argues that this was “a position [Aristotle] studiously avoided” (20). In addition, Carlson points out that action was the sole unity Aristotle “insisted upon” (19). It would seem that both Esslin and Young have reinterpreted Aristotle’s observations about Greek tragedy as rules to be followed through the interpretive lens of the neoclassical critics who retroactively proposed “unities” that were not present in the Poetics.

The best way to determine “whether a play is a play . . . is the relation between the idea and the medium” (49). The form and the content are mutually fit.

How then is the fitness of content and form specifically germane to the play cycle?

Sparks identifies the important relationship of content and form in the contemporary play-cycle, although she does not include it in her definition: “Dramatic form and social function are linked .

. . cycle plays, which virtually require a festival format, are best suited for theater that could provide world-changing enlightenment, rather than fashionable entertainment” (180). In Sparks’ estimation, the social function of “world-changing enlightenment” communicated in the content of the play-cycle (with her examples being the socially conscious Angels in America, The

Kentucky Cycle, and Tantalus) is best accomplished in the form of the multi-part play-cycle. It is only in the extensive and unfolding dramatic form of the play-cycle that the messages of vast, culture-altering content can appear. While Sparks provides a reasonable defense for the inseparability of content and form in the play-cycle, she fails to see how its form might also eschew such hyperbolic social functions as world-changing enlightenment—that play-cycles might be fit for something local, common, and less self-important and hegemonic. In short, is not a tiny square of land with its people and its stuff also worth a cycle? The form is not only fit for culture-encompassing narratives, but also for the localized narrative—a narrative of place.

Whereas Sparks certainly identifies compelling examples of play-cycles that address epic narratives of cultures, families, and time, she doesn’t acknowledge the place narrative as a potential aesthetic of the play-cycle. Sparks is intently focused on how ancient and contemporary play-cycles negotiate “timeless human concerns” in order to create “something of . . . universal significance” that “elevates” the theatre above the ordinary concerns of the hoi polloi and banal

23 commercial entertainment—a noble goal to be sure (182). But is the play-cycle form only suited to time (and timeless) narratives about cultures and families? And do place narratives exhibit a different aesthetic? In the same way a play-cycle tells the grand narratives of cultures and time, the play-cycle may also tell a narrative of place.

There are certainly detractors to the notion of place narratives in the theatre. Stark Young rejected the idea that the theatre was the history of “the objective world”—geographic place could not be the narrative of the theatre, only “man’s states of mind and spirit” (Theatre 19).

Likewise, Thomas E. Porter in Myth and the Modern American Mind places special emphasis on the gnostic aspects of the theatre’s influences. For Porter, place or “territory” as a catalyst for the

American theatre is non-existent, rather “milieu” is the only place-maker: “Territory is more a matter of attitude than of geographical location, so the immediate cultural situation is a milieu— the ideals, attitudes and institutions that distinguish the American group mind” (17). He severely limits a physical contextual exploration of the drama in his analysis of neutral and meaningless space. This limiting definition of what constitutes an analysis of “milieu” leaves little space for an aesthetic discussion of place. In Porter’s formula, plays can be analyzed contextually in three ways: culturally, structurally (their placement in “traditional dramatic forms”), and literarily (14).

While this method of analysis is certainly valuable, Porter disproportionately values the ideological over embodied approaches to analysis. Physical space is reduced to an incidental container that holds the more important “American group-mind” (17). Thornton Wilder, who attempted to tell universal, timeless narratives in Our Town and Skin of Our Teeth (and who also attempted to write two play-cycles of his own: The Seven Ages of Man and The Seven Deadly

Sins), also rejected the idea that literal place and locality could have any source as a creative impulse or as a narrative force:

When you emphasize place in the theater, you drag down and limit and harness

time to it. You thrust the action back into past time, whereas it is precisely the

glory of the stage that it is always “now” there. Under such production methods

the characters are all dead before the action starts. You don’t have to pay deeply

from your heart’s participation. No great age in the theater ever attempted to

capture the audience’s belief through this kind of specification and localization. I

became dissatisfied with the theater because I was unable to lend credence to such

childish attempts to be “real.” (Preface 685)

Wilder necessarily attaches place to reality. Reality, however, is a complex issue in the theatre— if one begins by reading Aristotle’s Poetics and systematically moves through Moliere’s defense of Tartuffe, Victor Hugo’s “Preface to Cromwell,” Emile Zola’s “Le Realisme” and “Naturalism on the Stage,” George Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Bertolt Brecht’s The Street

Scene, Robert Edmund Jones and Sheldon Cheney’s writings about the New Stagecraft in

Theatre Arts Magazine, and Edward Albee’s “Which Theatre is the Absurd One?”, the complexity becomes clear: reality is not something that can be solely relegated to the epochs of mimesis, romanticism, scientific naturalism, expressionism, alienation, or absurdism. Each of these eras has its own attempt to renegotiate reality. Tom Driver coalesces this negotiation of reality in his book Romantic Quest and Modern Query where he argues that the search for reality in the theatre is ongoing: romantics go on a quest for reality, moderns interrogate reality, and postmoderns decentralize reality from the spiritual or the natural world by placing it in the

25 performance itself—what he calls “theatrical positivism” where the reality of the theatre is the only reality (378). While it is apparent that Wilder is reacting to nineteenth-century fussy and formulaic melodrama that persisted in the theatre into the twentieth century, his marriage of reality to place is an uncertain one because the definition of reality is in constant flux. More broadly, realism is not a prerequisite to place in part because realism is continuously defined and redefined in the theatre—is it the mimesis of the way things ought to be (Aristotle), a balanced portrayal of the grotesque and the sublime (Hugo), an imitation of the natural world (Zola), or a rejection of commercial pabulum defined by futile pursuits of external reality in favor of the deeper reality of human alienation (Albee)? Each of these movements represents an ever- unfolding, increasingly complex reality.

While an in-depth, protracted discussion of what constitutes realism is outside the purview of this dissertation, the evidence above demonstrates that the discussion is valuable, well documented, and exceedingly complex. Russell Lynes’ study of American visual and performing arts at the fin de siècle and the first half of the twentieth century in The Lively

Audience: A Social History of the Visual and Performing Arts in America 1890-1950 demonstrates shifting notions of realism in the American theatre represented in the little theatre movement of the Washington Square Players and Provincetown Players: “Here was a new kind of realism, not the fussy David Belasco kind contrived out of a mass of staging details. It was a search for the truth that lies behind the façade of personality, ‘the dog beneath the skin.’ It sought to reveal the substance and nuances of emotion with subtlety and without conventional histrionics” (184). Realism was, once again, being reinvented.

Realism at the beginning of the American twentieth-century theatre is represented by the un-fussy plays of Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Elmer Rice. To propose, however, that one can determine what is broadly considered realism narrowly defines realism to a previous period—most notably, that of Emile Zola’s 1860s. Zola’s formula for naturalism was set forth in

“Le Realisme” as “the exact, complete, and sincere reproduction of the social surroundings of the time in which we live” (309). A study of realism in the theatre is still popularly considered a representation of observable reality—that is, it is heavily influenced by the modern scientific naturalism of Emile Zola. Ironically Zola’s commentary on realism contradicts the notion that he originated the idea: “Certainly realism is a theory as old as the world; only it is rejuvenated at each new literary period” (307). To necessarily attach reality to anything in the modern theatre ignores Eric Bentley’s dictum: “Life is short, art is long. The art of the theatre is many-sided; one hasn’t time to know all its facets” (109).

The stage setting littered with artifacts that Wilder eschews in his oeuvre is neither a prerequisite for reality nor a denial of it. Rather it is an act of place-making. When Didi and

Gogo sit down and remove their boots or walk the perimeter of the space unlittered by detritus in

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, they too are making a place—a place for the theatre to inhabit, a place for the human performance. And all the talk of invisible butternut trees and trellises by the Stage Manager in Wilder’s Our Town is not without its place-making effects. He sets the boundaries of the theatre’s place where beholder meets performance. Realism (in all its reiterations) is a fertile ground for place—whether it is the reality of a locale that is the subject of the drama or the reality of the theatre place itself. Edward Casey rightly observes: “To be in the world, to be situated at all, is to be in place” (xv). One can’t so easily remove oneself from place

27 by simply creating non-realistic theatre as Thornton Wilder conceived of it. Russell Lynes’ observation that “theatre [is] a composite affair, a four-dimensional art that occupie[s] time as well as place” with a complex community of people needed to succeed solidifies the place- specific nature of the theatre of any style—people convened in a fixed location are required to create theatre art as well as participate in its performance (180-81). The theatre event is and makes a place because, as Casey suggests, “a place is more an event than a thing to be assimilated to known categories” (329). The event of theatre is the explicit acknowledgement of place.

As has been demonstrated, any play might exhibit an aesthetic of place (whether it be deemed realism or not), but how does the play-cycle especially exhibit place? In his work on place, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Yi-Fu Tuan differentiates between space and place as contrasts of motion in location: “If we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place” (6). Place is a pause in movement through space—a pause crammed with

“the sensory and imaginative experience of the setting” (Gretlund 2). A return to Sparks’ definition provides the transition from space to place in the play-cycle: a play-cycle takes place

“in an unusually long single performance or over a few days” (181). If the play-cycle requires an extended time and place in which to tell its narrative, then the extended pause has a greater capacity to create an aesthetic of place. Movement is halted. Because of the multi-part nature of the play-cycle, time and space are extended, and the beholder must inhabit the space and wait in it imaginatively—making a place.

Closely related to the aesthetic of place is the necessity of repetitions in the play-cycle.

Sparks acknowledges a need for the repetition of character, but the repetition of place, form, content, and dialogue are also likely to appear. In her book, belonging: a culture of place, bell hooks writes about the connection of repetition to place when she tells the story of her ancestor quilt-makers in her home state of Kentucky—“each quilt had its own narrative”: a narrative of place (159). hooks write about her grandmother who would tell the stories of the quilts over and over and over again as she worked them. Her grandmother’s repetitions are reiterated in hooks’ own work where she finds “the same patterns of life repeat over and over. There is much repetition in this work” (3). The quilts contained stories, and their repetition in the context of the whole body of work produces a cycle: “Were they all collected together and shown they would reveal a culture of place carefully, imaginatively constructed” (168). The quilts embody a repetitive place-cycle of hooks’ Kentucky, both in content (the narratives) and form (the physical repetition required to make a quilt). The repetitions that appear in hooks’ storytelling and in the quilts of her ancestors are similarly at work in the play-cycle. Along with repeated characters,

Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle repeats dialogue and place throughout the play-cycle that covers two hundred years of a place and a family. Similarly, Horton Foote’s The Orphans’

Home Cycle is a narrative of repetitive character and place: the Robedaux family in Harrison,

Texas. And August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle repeats music, characters, and place (Pittsburgh’s

Hill District) in his ten-play cycle.

The most critical contribution of this expanded definition of the play-cycle is the focus on an aesthetic of place in the American play-cycle. And while other critical features of the play- cycle have been added—the inseparability of form and content and necessary repetition—even

29 these features contribute to the formation of an aesthetic of place. Jan Nordby Gretlund in his study of Eudora Welty’s aesthetic of place suggests that place-making in her fiction and photography were a result of her agrarian roots in the South. Obviously one need not be from the

South to have agrarian concerns or make art about place. Gretlund, however, makes an important connection between the agrarian ideas and an aesthetic of place, and it is modern-day agrarian writers who are calling for a return to place through a renewed interest in connections to the local landscape. Brian Donahue’s essay “The Resettling of America” outlines the agrarian values that are prevalent in a return to the primacy of place: land, beauty, food, work, and community.

Donahue suggests that these values are part of “a strong ‘sense of place’” that centralizes

“continuity with local history” (37). Other agrarians like Wendell Berry, John Russell Sanders,

Gene Logsdon, Norman Wirzba, Barbara Kingsolver, and bell hooks all call for an antimodern protest of the uncontested (sometimes blind) worship of industrialism, mindless acceptance of the primacy of time and space, and a general disregard for rootedness to place. To be clear, to be concerned with place does not require that a playwright or artist be only concerned with farming and the direct cultivation of the soil. Agrarian scholar Norman Wirzba points out that the agrarian has broader concerns: “the care of all living spaces . . . that maintain life,” and “the many places where we live and . . . the many tasks we perform” (“Agrarianism Matters” 6, 7).

The primary concern for the agrarian is the place wherever one happens to be. Gene Logsdon’s discussion of the agrarian artist Andrew Wyeth in his book The Mother of all Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse reveals the artist’s concern for place: “All of his paintings are of people, places, and things captured in the here and now, alive and kicking” (32). These three subjects—people, places (landscapes), and things—along with the artist’s body (“art is . . .

30 elementally biological in its impulsive first stages”) also represent ways in which place is made in Edward Casey’s discussion of returning to place in the midst of late modern and postmodern displacement (10).

Casey explores this state of mass displacement and proposes that despite a culture’s migration and re-placement in a new landscape, “entire cultures can become profoundly averse to the places they inhabit, feeling atopic and displaced within their own implacement” (34). He uses the displaced Navajo people as an example of a native people displaced because of exile from their land. Casey suggests native peoples in America are not the only ones who feel the effects of mass atopia—we all do: “As moderns and postmoderns in the Eurocentric West, we too are displaced persons” (37). Nor are only certain classes in jeopardy of displacement.

Wendell Berry notes that “nearly our whole population is now dispossessed, and our most populous economic classes are the affluent dispossessed and the impoverished dispossessed”

(Hidden Wound 118). This widespread displacement isn’t exclusively caused by physical exile and relocation, but by the prioritizations of modernity: time, space, and the incessant motion of the technopolis. Nor is displacement only physical. It has a spiritual or psychological dimension as well. Lears discusses how the antimodernist feels spiritually displaced in a modern world—“a sense of frustrated helplessness” because of the absence of “authentic experience, physical or spiritual” (57). The American play-cycle is concerned with both kinds of displacement. August

Wilson identifies the physical displacement of Africans and African Americans resulting from enslavement, but this physical displacement has an affect of spiritual displacement on his community—the loss of land becomes a loss of self. Horton Foote deals more specifically with spiritual displacement in The Orphans’ Home Cycle—mothers and fathers abandon and

31 sometimes abuse their children—but this spiritual displacement is often cured through physical emplacement.

Knowledge of the symptoms of mass physical and spiritual (or psychological) displacement prevalent in late modernity provides a way to diagnose the systemic problem and propose a cure. Of all the symptoms (“disorientation, memory loss, homelessness, depression, and various modes of estrangement from self and others”), Casey identifies “nostalgia [as] one of the most revealing” symptoms of displacement (37).12 As late moderns suffering from atopia and a preoccupation with time, it is easy to make the assumption that nostalgia is the pining for a lost time: one in which hand tools are still used to build furniture, horses are still used to plow fields, and (as the saying goes) times were simpler. But Casey provides a different definition:

“Nostalgia, contrary to what we usually imagine, is not merely a matter of regret for lost times; it is also a pining for lost places, for places we have once been in yet can no longer reenter” (37).

The cure of which is neither a nostalgic return to a simpler past (which wasn’t simple at all) nor a nostalgic view of the future “into utopias or the exotica of outer space,” but rather is a robust implacement in which we “regain living contact with place itself, to remember that place is a remarkable thing” (39). Place-making turns displacement into emplacement and consequently

12 Gene Logsdon proposes this same mass nostalgia evident in the criticisms of Andrew Wyeth’s work by urbanites. One critic called Wyeth’s paintings “little more than rural nostalgia,” to which Logsdon responds: “They might seem nostalgic to city dwellers because the environment depicted is to them a foreign one. But they were not conceived as nostalgic by Wyeth, and they are not viewed as nostalgic by agrarians.” They are not nostalgic because they are not the pining for a hyperbolized time “out of some past memory,” but an acknowledgement of the “here and now.” Logsdon goes on to criticize the elite urban dweller as having his or her own brand of nostalgia: “One can argue that there is something nostalgic about almost all paintings, but critics don’t use the phrase little more when referring to urban nostalgia, or modernist nostalgia, or art dealer nostalgia. Little more is a dead giveaway of prejudice against rural living. It is another put-down of the roots of American civilization” (32). Nostalgia isn’t exclusive to the desire for a lost rural time or place, but also a lost urban time or place.

32 eliminates the need for nostalgia—a pining for lost places. This reorientation to place begins with a reconnection to the body.

Casey articulates four ways place-making occurs: through the human body, through built places, through the un-built landscape, and in the journey between places. These provide a concrete structure on which to place the American play-cycles that attempt to cure our late modern atomism and atopia (xvi, x). Place is made in two ways: through the human body and through built places. But how is place made in the play-cycles? How are the characters of the play-cycle experiencing this atopia? And what is the playwright proposing for the characters as a cure for displacement?

In August Wilson’s ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle, the playwright explores how emplacement in the body itself provides a return to place for the African American community.13 Wilson reminded his audience in 1996 at the Theatre Communication’s Group, both in a remembrance of the past and a resistance to it, that “the history of our bodies . . . is not for rent” (30). The

African American body is neither a site of white appropriation nor an other in the Pittsburgh

Cycle.14 Instead, the African American body has the primacy of place. Wilson’s characters

13 I use the term “community” in the same way August Wilson does in his 1996 keynote address at the Theatre Communication’s Group, The Ground On Which I Stand. He differentiates between race and culture, and in doing so provides an important context and defense of the use of the word community to define the body of people for whom and to whom he writes his play-cycle: “When I say culture, I am speaking about the behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other product of human work and thought as expressed in a particular community of people. . . . Those who would deny black Americans their culture would also deny them their history and the inherent values that are a part of all human life” (14-15). Wilson differentiates between the features of white culture and black culture and sees that differentiation as a means of reclaiming African American history, community, and ultimately place. The community itself is a place whose ingredients are behaviors, arts, beliefs, institutions, food, homes, and artifacts—any cultural stuff produced by the community. 14 Both August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks provide a defense for Black Theatre that exists without the white culture as its other. Parks’ “an Equation for Black People Onstage” articulates a kind of theatre that doesn’t acknowledge white culture as the antagonist—in the same way white theatre doesn’t need black culture to exist: “Black presence on stage is more than a sign or messenger of some political point” (21). Wilson provides an

33 struggle and find a way to make a new place through their embodied memory of their history and culture. This is done through the discussion and consumption of food. Robert Capon’s observation that “the uniqueness, the placiness, of places derives not from abstractions like location, but from confrontations like man-onion” suggests that place is made through the intersections of the human body and food (Capon 11). Wilson’s characters participate in these culinary intersections (or what Capon calls “Sessions”) in order to embody the memories that emplace them.15

Horton Foote’s nine-play The Orphans’ Home Cycle set in Harrison, Texas (the name he gave to his hometown and the setting for nearly all his plays), provides an example of the play- cycle that proposes a return to place, specifically through the built environment and the artifacts it inevitably contains—what William Stott has called “American stuff” (51). The play-cycle acts as a dwelling: “a middle ground between nature and culture” where Horace Robedaux seeks to find his place in a community where he was rendered placeless through abandonment (Casey

112). For Foote, emplacement occurs despite the violence and chaos, but can only be attained

important historical foundation for two different types of Black Theatre: “There have always been two distinct and parallel traditions in black art. That is art that is conceived and designed to entertain white society and art that feeds the spirit and celebrates the life of Black America by designing its strategies for survival and prosperity” (18). There is the theatre of the “big house” and of the “slave quarters.” Wilson and Parks place themselves in the former category—a “self-defining ground” (19-20). 15 John Timpane’s essay “Filling the Time: Reading History in the Drama of August Wilson” explores the Aristotelian nature of Wilson’s plays and compares their tragedy to the tragedy of Oedipus. He asserts Troy Maxson and Ma Rainey’s embodiment of tragic inevitability: “What we are encouraged to see as admirable in both Ma Rainey and Troy Maxson—their insistence on their right to assert themselves in the ambit of their experience (even if that experience is mean, shabby, or poor)—also produces their blindness to the change in time. As it does for Oedipus, the failure to shift readings renders them noble and tragic. In this respect, Wilson’s drama closely follows Aristotelian precepts. Dramatic irony issues from the audience’s ability to mark the historical shift that the protagonist insists on denying” (78-79). Similarly, Wilson asserts in his speech “The Ground on Which I Stand” that the Black Theatre robustly inhabits the American theatre which stands on the foundation of the Greek dramatists: “It is based on the proscenium stage and the poetics of Aristotle. This is the theater we have chosen to work in. We embrace the values of that theater but reserve the right to amend, to explore, to add our African consciousness and our African aesthetic to the art we produce” (11). Wilson writes within Aristotle’s tradition and the foundation of the European and American theatres.

34 when one confronts the reality of the chaos. He both exposes the mythology of the small town and creates characters who are required to embrace the complexities of the mythology in order to become rooted in place.

Russell Lynes, in his discussion of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude and Mourning

Becomes Electra (the former a five-hour play, and the later an American Oresteia in three parts), observes that O’Neill asks a great deal of his audience—he “experimented with theatrical forms and challenged the patience, tolerance, and endurance of his audiences and forced them to consider with him the profoundest passions of man” (195). O’Neill asked them to inhabit the theatre while he unfolded the vagaries of being human. The lengthy American play-cycle also asks for patience, tolerance, and endurance from the audience. It asks for an intense engagement with the theatre place itself—“an infinite abound concentrated into a finite arena” (Driver 463).

It asks the audience to pause. O’Neill’s experiments in excessive theatre foreshadow the

American play-cycle’s return to place as a curative for displacement. Is it possible that the cure to the low-grade, persistent atopia brought on by our “alienation . . . from (a given) place” is found in the complex, place-oriented play-cycles in the American theatre (Casey xiv)? By reorienting the narratives of place in which the story of a locality and its people are told, a renewed rootedness to community, built environments, and the landscape will result in a revived appreciation for the deep complexity of and our mutual responsibility to the humans that share our places.

CHAPTER 2

SESSIONS OF EMPLACEMENT IN AUGUST WILSON’S PITTSBURGH CYCLE

Our manners, our style, our approach to language, our gestures, and our bodies are not for rent. The history of our bodies, the maimings . . . the lashings . . . the lynchings . . . the body that is capable of inspiring profound rage and pungent cruelty . . . is not for rent. Nor is the meaning of the history of our bodies for rent. . . . We are unique, and we are specific.

—August Wilson, The Ground on Which I Stand

Moses closed his eyes and bent down and took a pinch of the soil and ate it with no more thought than if it were a spot of cornbread. He worked the dirt around in his mouth and swallowed, leaning his head back and opening his eyes in time to see the strip of sun fade to dark blue and then to nothing. He was the only man in the realm, slave or free, who ate dirt, but while the bondage women, particularly the pregnant ones, ate it for some incomprehensible need, for that something that ash cakes and apples and fatback did not give their bodies, he ate it not only to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the field, but because the eating of it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life.

—Edward P. Jones, The Known World

. . . BLACK MAN WITH WATER- MELON, BLACK WOMAN WITH FRIED DRUMSTICK, LOTS OF GREASE AND LOTS OF PORK, YES AND GREENS BLACK-EYED PEAS CORNBREAD . . .

—Suzan-Lori Parks, Possession

35 36

In what appears to be a divergent moment in the larger dramatic narrative structure of

Radio Golf (the final play of August Wilson’s ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle), Old Joe seems to digress into the banal and commonplace:

HARMOND. Mr. Barlow, it’s good to see you. I have something for you.

OLD JOE: It ain’t no bread pudding, is it? I was just thinking about some bread

pudding. You like bread pudding? My mother used to make bread pudding. She

made the best bread pudding. She didn’t do it too often but when she did she used

to make a great big old pan last two or three days. It ain’t no bread pudding, is it?

(58)

Old Joe is the owner of a piece of land and house that Harmond Wilks, an influential real-estate agent and political hopeful, has underhandedly purchased to transform into a lucrative apartment complex, a Whole Foods, and a Starbucks. Wilks does not have bread pudding for Old Joe but a ten-thousand-dollar check for the property. Old Joe refuses it. He prefers a pan of his mother’s bread pudding.

At first glance this scene doesn’t progress the narrative or the play’s dramatic form; however, it is an important point of discussion in the final interview August Wilson gave before his death in 2005 to Suzan-Lori Parks—she calls it a “beautiful digression” in the play’s overall structure (74). Why is this gastronomic digression, which wouldn’t “survive the test of a thousand dramaturgs,” such an essential one in the context of the Pittsburgh Cycle (74)? And how does it display Wilson’s contribution to an aesthetic of place that is representative of the

American play-cycle? Wilson’s response to Parks illuminates the impulse for his epic work:

So the bread pudding is simply representative of some of those houses that are

still standing—the old way, the parts of the community that we’re giving up. Miss

Harriet, the fried chicken—these are all the things that were part of this Pittsburgh

community that are being changed because of this slickness with the new building

and Barnes & Noble and Whole Foods and Starbucks, simply to entice middle-

class people to move back to the Hill . . . . But the bread pudding is saying, “Wait

a minute, there’s a history here and it doesn’t fit in with your guys’ stuff.” The

bread pudding is not part of the traditional structure of the play, but it’s part of the

structure of this particular community backed up against change. (74)

Bread pudding and fried chicken are symbolic of the need for a recovery of cultural memory that results from the loss of place the black community experiences in Wilson’s 1990’s gentrifying

Hill District. The community is being displaced through incessant motion, as they have been before. Wilson attempts to cure their displacement by telling a one hundred year narrative of memory: “Without knowing your past, you don’t know your present—and you certainly can’t plot your future” (DeVries 25). For Wilson, food represents a return to “the old way”—a memory of the past that will guide his community into the future, a way to establish the stability of place. In his ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle, August Wilson explores the displacing affects of

African American migration and seeks a cure for a displaced community by weaving stories of foodways that incite memories and build community. Through his food narrative he locates placement in the bodies of his characters—they find their way into place through the food they eat.

Wilson conjures images of characters seeking a cure to their displacement. He encourages a look back toward the African American experience in the agrarian South (and even further back to their origins in Africa) with the hope of finding a place in the past that will act as an antidote to displacement in the present and the future. In a 1990 interview with Mervyn

Rothstein, Wilson suggests that forgetfulness of the black agrarian experience by the black community itself results from the mass migratory displacement to the industrial North at the end of the nineteenth century. Their exodus from the land (whether forced, by choice, or in the hope of finding something better) resulted in chronic displacement:

We were land-based agrarian people from Africa. We were uprooted from Africa,

and we spent over 200 years developing our culture as black Americans. And then

we left the South. We uprooted ourselves and attempted to transplant this culture

to the pavements of the industrialized North. And it was a transplant that did not

take. I think if we had stayed in the South, we would have been a stronger people.

And because the connection between the South of the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s has

been broken, it’s very difficult to understand who we are. In all my plays . . . I

always point toward making that connection, toward reconnecting with the past.

You have to know who you are, and understand your history in America over

more than 300 years, in order to know what your relation is to your society.

(Rothstein 3)

Wilson’s play-cycle is predicated on three migrations, and resulting displacements, that Africans endured on their way to becoming slaves in the United States, during their enslavement, and after their emancipation.

The first mass migration of Africans to America, known as the “Middle Passage,” began in the sixteenth century with the arrival of Atlantic Creoles who came from the Atlantic littoral on board European exploring ships (Berlin 23). Atlantic Creoles were “cosmopolitan in the fullest sense” and often acted as mediators between European and African traders—speaking multiple languages and deftly moving between cultures (23). The Middle Passage reached its peak in the late seventeenth century as plantation culture took hold in the South and laborers were in high demand. According to Ira Berlin, one-half million Africans were brought from the interior of Africa to the coast of what would become the United States—primarily to the

Chesapeake and the slave markets of Charleston in the South Carolina lowcountry.

Following the American Revolution, the “Second Middle Passage” began when the land in South Carolina and Georgia became overworked and would-be plantation owners moved west for more fertile land. Because of the high demand, slaves were transported west from the lowcountry of South Carolina, formerly freed slaves were kidnapped and sold back into slavery, and slaves that lived in northern states that had already abolished slavery were often sold south.

The legal transatlantic slave trade ended in 1808 even while the demand for slaves increased in the southern interior (Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas) with the rise of cotton and sugar production. Berlin notes that the displacement of slaves during the

Second Middle Passage was greater than the first: “displac[ing] more than a million men and women, dwarfing the transatlantic slave trade that had carried Africans to the mainland” (162).

Like the Middle Passage of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Second Middle Passage

“traumatized black people, both slave and free. . . . the colossal transfer cast a shadow over all aspects of black life, leaving no part unaffected” (162). In addition to the radical changes in

40 family make-up because of the massive displacement, the Second Middle Passage altered slaves’ religious sentiments. For two hundred years slaves, for the most part, had rejected the teachings of Christianity, but during their migration into the southern interior, many accepted Christianity, blending it with their African spiritualism to form a syncretic religion (162).

The third migration occurred after the emancipation of the Civil War—what Berlin calls the “Freedom Generation” (245). With this emancipation came an increasingly complex movement of a now African American people remaking their humanity after three hundred years of captivity. While some African Americans migrated south looking for opportunities for land ownership—to reclaim the land their ancestors had worked—others went west looking for lost families and the promise of better work, and still others migrated north to urban centers where they could find work and a community less hostile to their culture. This diversity of migrations

“reflected the desire of black men and women who had been shuttled from place to place, hired to farmers and mechanics—sometimes seasonally, sometimes annually, and sometimes by the job—for a modicum of stability, for a home where they could enter the marketplace and sell their labor on their own terms” (248-49). Wherever they migrated, they were looking for a way to overcome three centuries of displacement and find a place where they could build a community and become “a People” (249).

August Wilson begins his play-cycle in the midst of this third migration, narrating the

African American migration from the agrarian South to the industrialized North in the twentieth century. In doing so he shows the ongoing displacement that occurs in the migration from the agrarian to the industrial, a “fever chart of the unmooring trauma of slavery” as a people move

“from property to personhood” (Wilson, Introduction Gem vii).

In her book, belonging: a culture of place, bell hooks discusses African American displacement. Like Wilson, she notes “that black people were first and foremost a people of the land”—both in their African and Atlantic littoral homelands, as well as in the American, agrarian

South (36). hooks suggests that the black community’s connection with the land was what helped establish their sense of place (a connection “that was ongoing and life-affirming”) (36). The ensuing black migration from the South dealt a damaging blow to the “communal practices that were so central to survival in the agrarian south” (37). hooks’ concerns with place and displacement (and its resulting effects on the body) aren’t explicitly present in Wilson’s 1990 interview, but are, instead, illustrated in his play-cycle. Mass displacement from the slavery of the agrarian South to the slavery of “industrial capitalism . . . fundamentally altered black people’s relationship to the body” (37). Ultimately displacement from the land resulted in further displacement from the body that began when Africans were taken from their home, their bodies were sold and kept as property in America, and attempts were made to dehumanize them—

“Black men are ‘a commodity of flesh and muscle which has lost its value in the marketplace’”

(Wilson quoted in Lahr, Introduction x).

This important theme of the ongoing effects of northern industrialism on the displaced bodies of African Americans is evident throughout Wilson’s play-cycle. His introduction to

Fences vividly sets the scene of the effects on the displaced “descendants of African slaves” who were relegated to the margins of the city—“they fled and settled along the riverbanks and under bridges in shallow, ramshackle houses made of sticks and tarpaper” (Wilson 1315). The city compromised African Americans’ way of life, their place on the land, and their place in their bodies: “They collected rags and wood. They sold the use of their muscles and their bodies”

(1315). For Wilson, the ongoing external displacement of African Americans caused by their migration to northern urban centers not only affected their location—inhabiting the marginal spaces along rivers and under bridges—but displaced them from their physical selves.

Although Wilson’s characters robustly inhabit the Hill District—they own homes and businesses, have sex and children, sing and dance, even cultivate the ground—the transplant did not take (Rothstein 3). Wilson’s cure for the failed transplant is for his characters to reconnect with and remember the past. Edward Casey’s observation that “to be dis-placed is therefore to incur both culture loss and memory loss resulting from the loss of the land itself” suggests that displacement itself causes memory loss (Casey 37). One way Wilson attempts to alleviate the displacing symptoms of “chronic cultural amnesia” is by placing the three hundred sixty-six- year-old Aunt Ester at the cultural center of his cycle (Lahr, Introduction xi, Casey 38). Her body, like a living cenotaph, contains the memories of the past that can cure the displacement of an entire community.

How does August Wilson employ an aesthetic of place to provide a reconnection and return to place in his cycle? What is his prescription for what Wendell Berry calls a “contempt for the body” that is the result of three centuries of enslavement and “devalu[ation of] the body”

(Unsettling 105)? Through characters like Old Joe in the last play of the cycle and Aunt Ester in the first play, August Wilson proposes a cure for African American displacement through his characters finding their place in their bodies—a place made through the creation, discussion, and consumption of food.

Edward Casey addresses the necessity of placement in the body to overcome the affects of physical and psychological displacement—it is only through the body that we can know

43 placement: “there is no place without body” (Casey 104). The continuous migration that enslaved blacks endured (and the ensuing repeated loss of place) made it difficult for them to have a sense of what kinds of places they inhabited. Stephanie E. Smallwood suggests in her book Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (2007) that calling the transatlantic passage “middle” suggests those who were enslaved had a sense of time and place—they knew where they were and knew where they were going. She argues for the alternative. Saltwater slaves (those who were taken directly from Africa to America without stopping in the Atlantic littoral) exited the ship and inevitably asked the question: “Where are we now that we have escaped the slave ship?” (183). The narrative line that connects West Africa to the Middle Passage to the lowcountry is a narrative construction retroactively told about the slave experience, but not one the enslaved actually experienced at the time. Instead, “the slave ship charted no course of narrative continuity between the African past and American present, but rather memorialized an indeterminate passage marked by the impossibility of full narrative closure” (207). For the enslaved, coming to America “put Africans into a new relationship to time-space, one that was at first a temporal and spatial disconnect” (184). They were utterly disoriented and displaced. Time and place became unfixed.

Casey suggests this unmooring of place into unfixed space results in a disassociation from one’s body: “The more one considers space as unlimited . . . the less one will be concerned with the position of the human body in the vastness of space. Only if explicit attention is given to the lived body in relation to its whereabouts does the importance of place in distinction to space become fully evident” (46). Displacement from the body, resulting from forced migration, can only be remedied by giving attention to the needs of the lived body. Smallwood suggests that one

44 of the most important orienting events in the life of the newly arrived enslaved was “creat[ing] kinship and community out of the disaggregated units remaining after the market’s dispersal of its human wares” (183). She points to the role of food in helping to make this happen:

Perhaps no area of expertise was more important than the skills associated with

acquiring and preparing food. Indeed, over time, the feeding of newly purchased

slaves came to be recognized by New World planters as one of the most important

determinants of their survival during the “seasoning period.” By the eighteenth

century, it was common in the English sugar islands to assign the care of newly

purchased slaves to a trusted older slave who was responsible for overseeing their

diet. (197)

The enslaved sought integration and placement via the foodways of the community they entered.

In the mid-eighteenth century urban slaves found slivers of independence on the outskirts of

Charleston, South Carolina, where they met to eat and drink. While not strictly legal, “slaves established cook shops, groceries, and taverns to cater to their own people” (Berlin 80). They formed a community and made attempts at place-making by creating their own foodways and food-places.

Jessica B. Harris, in her book High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to

America (2011), tracks the development of African American food culture from the Atlantic

Creoles and the saltwater slaves that arrived during the Middle Passage all the way through the

Civil Rights Movement and the “African American culinary omnivore” at the end of the twentieth century, with many stops in between (219). She recounts a narrative of Sunday mornings in the Alexandria, Virginia slave-run market where the enslaved were allowed to meet

45 and trade their home-grown foodstuffs during a brief liberty from the plantations on which they labored. While men and women traded food and ate together at the Sunday market, it was also an opportunity for them to exchange information about the Underground Railroad, which plantation owners were selling off slaves, and news of family members:

The market provided not only a place for garnering a few coins to pay for

additional food or a bit of tobacco or something else to alleviate the monotonous

drudgery of enslavement; it was also a place where folks could smile and court

and even listen to music if someone had brought along a fiddle. It was a spot

where for a few brief moments, the yoke of enslavement was lifted, and blacks

could be themselves among themselves. (85)

The Sunday market wasn’t simply an encounter for an exchange of food, but the essential ingredient for the makings of a community—a way for enslaved Africans to make their own place.

The role of food in building community and place-making continued after Emancipation and into the twentieth century with the Great Migration. Harris notes that at the turn of the twentieth century, seven-eighths of the African American population lived in the South; however, by 1925 one-tenth of the population had moved north: “They headed toward metropolises where there were jobs in the factories created by increasing industrialization. . . . and began to make their presence felt by creating neighborhoods and communities where they supported and sustained one another in their churches, their shops, their restaurants, and their gathering places” (172). They’d begun the community building that would result in the establishment and proliferation of their food culture in the North.

The Great Migration brought African American foodways from the South, developed over three centuries, to the North where migrants sold food out of their apartments, opened restaurants, and became street vendors. Harris notes, “These spots grew into small mom-and-pop restaurants known to those in the neighborhood for providing fried chicken and okra, hog maws and collard greens—in short, the comfort food the displaced Southerners craved” (175). The enslaved had been responsible for the eating habits cultivated in southern plantation houses— they introduced foods of West African origin: okra, watermelon, black-eyed peas, and rice (all generously spiced)—and now they were responsible for introducing comfort food to the North.

Their northward migration introduced “iconic black foods” that “aided the northward movement of traditional African American foodways from the South” (178). In this way, Harris points out,

African American food became the comfort food of both North and South, and the once enslaved became the culinary colonizers of the United States. African Americans were making a place in the throes of yet another migration.

The epigraph at the beginning of this chapter from Edward Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World (2003) narrates an event that connects the memory of place with the act of eating. When an enslaved Moses consumes the soil as if it were “a spot of cornbread” he embodies the inescapable relationship between his body and the land.16 Moses eats the place itself—the soil—to establish a connection between his body and the place: “The eating of it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life” (1). He

16 Moses’ consumption of soil should not be confused with pica—an eating disorder in which pregnant women and those with mineral deficiencies will eat soil or other nonnutritive substances in order to mitigate their nutritional deficiency. Moses consumes the soil to bring his body into direct contact with the land. Edward Jones seems to be suggesting that the man did it to signify his dependence upon the soil to sustain his life.

47 values the place as much as his own body. Casey’s observation that “place is what takes place between body and landscape” reflects Moses’ culinary act: eating makes place (29). Robert

Capon similarly connects the act of eating with the establishment of place: “The uniqueness, the placiness, of places derives not from abstractions like location, but from confrontations like man-onion” (11). In Capon’s example, place occurs in the communion of the human body and food—he defines this place as “a Session, a meeting, a confrontation—of real beings” eating together (170). Place is made through the communal (and relational) consumption of food. The history of African American migrations, and the culinary culture recreated over and over again following those migrations, suggests the importance of foodways in helping the displaced make a place.

Wilson identifies the connection between food and place in his 1996 address to the

Theatre Communications Group “The Ground on Which I Stand” where he calls for the creation and funding of a black theatre that would revive the history and memory of the African

American community—a theatre tradition begun “in the confines of the slave quarters” that

sought to invest his spirit with the strength of his ancestors by conceiving of his

art, in his song and dance, a world in which he was the spiritual center and his

existence was a manifest act of the creator from whom life flowed. He then could

create art that was functional and furnished him with a spiritual temperament

necessary for his survival as property and the dehumanizing status that was

attendant to that. I stand myself and my art squarely on the self-defining ground

of the slave quarters and find the ground to be hallowed and made fertile by the

blood and bones of the men and women who can be described as warriors on the

cultural battlefield that affirmed their self-worth. As there is no idea that cannot

be contained by black life, these men and women found themselves to be

sufficient and secure in their art and their instructions. (19-20)

Wilson wanted a culturally unique theatre that would help African Americans remember their past through an embodied performance, not for “the big house to entertain the slaveowner and his guests,” but a self-defining theatre securely placed in the memory of the slave quarters—a place littered with the memories of the ancestral bodies (and bones) who fought for a place of their own (19). Because of these memories (that reside in the land and the bodies of the enslaved), Wilson asserts that black theatre comes with its own culture—one with its own

“culinary values, different culinary histories . . . different food and drink” (27). Agrarian writer

Barbara Kingsolver’s observation that “food culture . . . arises out of a place, a soil, a climate, a history, a temperament, a collective sense of belonging” is in line with Wilson’s assertion about the place-oriented foodways that exist for the African American community and the reason for their presence in the Pittsburgh Cycle (17). Wilson’s characters seek a sense of belonging in their place through the culinary choices that arise out of their history and memory of enslavement: “In our culinary history we have learned to make do with the feet and ears and tails and intestines of the pig rather than the loin and the ham and the bacon. Because of our different histories with the same animal, we have different culinary ideas” (27). In Wilson’s play-cycle, food (like music and language) is the struggle for a sense of place—a resistance—from the margin.17 A culinary

17 bell hooks provides a defense of the margin as a unique place of resistance rather than as a site of the other: “I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance—as location of radical openness and possibility. This site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination. We come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle. We know struggle to be that

49 narrative is the entrance into Wilson’s unique and specific “cultural ground” and hooks’

“aesthetic of blackness—strange and oppositional” found in the Pittsburgh Cycle (31, hooks, belonging 134).

Wilson’s call for a black theatre—with its own aesthetic values—has a history extending back to W. E. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka. It is further developed in the writing of Suzan-Lori Parks. Mikell Pinkney elegantly describes the historical development of the black theatre aesthetic in his essay “The Development of African

American Dramatic Theory: W. E. B. Dubois to August Wilson—Hand to Hand!” Pinkney argues that African American dramatic theory is concerned with how the “through-line that connects all things past and present is a constant focus on potential and spiritual awareness, or

‘blood memory’” (16). He suggests that African American dramatic theory uniquely asks the question: “How do we hope to educate the general public about black art’s unique spiritual nature?” (16). Wilson’s theory for a black theatre is situated in this discussion, beginning with the enslaved Africans singing and dancing on-board ships during the Middle Passage and their performances on plantations in the South—they “were actually disguised versions of African ritual acts infused with spiritual meaning and new purpose” (17). Pinkney identifies DuBois’

which pleasures, delights, and fulfills desire. We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world” (153). Similarly, Wilson acknowledges himself (as part of black theatre) as residing in the margins in his address “The Ground on Which I Stand”: “Black Theater in America is alive . . . it is vibrant . . . it is vital . . . it just isn’t funded. Black Theater doesn’t share in the economics that would allow it to support its artists and supply them with meaningful avenues to develop their talent and broadcast and disseminate ideas crucial to its growth. The economics are reserved as privilege to the overwhelming abundance of institutions that preserve, promote, and perpetuate white culture” (17). Wilson resists the notion of colorblind casting that (one might argue) would bring black actors out of the margin into the center—this would “deny us our own humanity, our own history” (31). Rather, Wilson (like Suzan-Lori Parks and hooks) suggests that learning to resist in the margins—where resistance is allowed—the black theatre draws upon its own memory to create a new language of struggle that pulls it into the center.

1926 address “Criteria of Negro Art” as an early articulation of a unique African American aesthetic (begun in The Souls of Black Folk)—an assertion that “the potential of Negro art would be to express the beauty of an African American cosmic spirituality” (19). DuBois calls upon black artists to stop being “ashamed” of the past, and, instead, use it as a resource for the creation of beauty: “Suddenly, this same past is taking on form, color, and reality, and in a half shame- faced way we are beginning to be proud of it” (DuBois 11). For DuBois, memory of the past enlivens the black aesthetic and envisions

what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world; if we had the true

spirit; if we had the seeing eye, the cunning hand, the feeling heart; if we had, to

be sure, not perfect happiness, but Plenty of good hard work, the inevitable

suffering that always comes with life; sacrifice and waiting, all that—but

nevertheless lived in a world where men know, where men, create, where they

realize themselves and where they enjoy life. (6)

Like DuBois, James Weldon Johnson mines the traditional formula of goodness, beauty, and truth as a way to create art that makes a “common audience out of white and black America” in his 1928 essay “The Dilemma of the Negro Author”: “The equipped Negro author working at his best in his best known material can achieve this end; but, standing on his racial foundation, he must fashion something that rises above race, and reaches out to the universal in truth and beauty” (481). Johnson demonstrates how this works in performance in God’s Trombones: Seven

Negro Sermons in Verse where he employs the traditions of the African American preacher who

“was above all an orator, and in good measure an actor” (5). By using the preacher’s poetic

51 performance, the essence of theatre, he educated a common audience of black and white about the nature of his spirituality:

What the colored poet in the United States needs to do is something like what

Synge did for the Irish; he needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit

by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without—such as the mere

mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation. He needs a form that is freer and

larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor; a form expressing

the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought and the distinctive humor

and pathos, too, of the Negro, but which will also be capable of voicing the

deepest and highest emotions and aspirations and allow of the widest range of

subjects and the widest scope of treatment. (8-9)

Johnson refused to write his poem-sermons in dialect because it reduced the audience response into “pathos and humor”—“a literary imitation of Mississippi cotton-field dialect is sheer burlesque” (7, 9). Instead he demonstrated a black aesthetic that sought new forms for the communication of African American culture and spirituality, a form rooted in memories of the

“sonorous, mouth-filling, ear-filling . . . sound and rhythm” of the African languages (9). Both

DuBois and Johnson were concerned with drawing upon memory and the aesthetic traditions of goodness, beauty, and truth to create a form for the black aesthetic that would tell the story of black spiritual awareness.

Langston Hughes similarly called for a form that would allow black artists to communicate their spiritual nature. Like Wilson, he advocated a black theatre that had its origins in a robust memory of the past: “Now I await the rise of the Negro theater” (256). In his 1949

52 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes laments the young black artist’s

“desire to run away spiritually from his race” by trying to win “the race toward whiteness”—to lose his individuality and memory (253). He advocates for a black aesthetic that is rooted in beauty unknown to a white culture, rather than a universal beauty:

And when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in

this county with their innumerable overtones and undertones, surely, and

especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes

at hand. To these the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of

rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues,

becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears. (255)

Langston Hughes is well known for his 1935 Broadway play Mulatto, which Pinkney suggests was successful because of its “resemblance to European-derived dramatic forms” (22). So while he advocated an expression of unique African American beauty, he still employed the traditions of western theatre. Hughes wasn’t alone in his use of traditional forms. Wilson also identified his plays as part of the European theatre “based on the proscenium stage and the poetics of

Aristotle,” but left a way open for African American theatre artists to create new forms: “We embrace the values of that theater but reserve the right to amend, to explore, to add our African consciousness and our African aesthetic to the art we produce” (Wilson, “Ground” 41). Many

African American theatre artists work within European-derived dramatic forms along with

Hughes and Wilson. Both Theordore Ward’s Big White Fog and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun offer similar examples. These plays suggest the black aesthetic that expresses the

African American spirit flourishes in whatever form suits the narrative.

The writing of Amiri Baraka signals a shift in African American dramatic theory in the

1960s during the Civil Rights Movement. He advocated a theatre of revolt that “should force change, it should be change” in his 1965 essay “In Search of the Revolutionary Theatre” (1).

Rather than employ European dramatic forms, Baraka advocated (like Artaud) the destruction of forms to create a revolutionary black theatre:

The Revolutionary Theatre must Accuse and Attack anything that can be accused

and attacked. It must Accuse and Attack because it is a theatre of Victims. It looks

at the sky with the victims’ eyes, and moves the victims to look at the strength in

their minds and their bodies. . . . the Revolutionary Theatre, even if it is Western,

must be anti-Western. It must show horrible coming attractions of The Crumbling

West. (1)

Baraka expresses anger at the western theatre “for presuming with their technology to deny the supremacy of the Spirit” (1). Baraka’s black theatre was to be a celebration of the black spirit unhindered by western technological rationalism—“spiritual consciousness . . . developed by listening to ancestral voices that speak to the soul or spirit” (Pinkney 24). In 1965 Baraka suggested old forms had to be destroyed in order to develop a black aesthetic, but in 1986 he seemed to soften his stance in an essay about Hansberry’s use of a traditional European form in

A Raisin in the Sun. In his preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of her play, he calls her an important “critical realist” who “analyzes and assesses reality and shapes her statement as an aesthetically powerful and politically advanced work of art” (“Enduring Passion” 10). He defends her work as revolutionary in content although traditional in form:

We thought Hansberry’s play was part of the “passive resistance” phase of the

movement, which was over the minute Malcolm’s penetrating eyes and words

began to charge through the media with deadly force. We thought her play

“middle class” in that its focus seemed to be on “moving into white folks’

neighborhoods,” when most blacks were just trying to pay their rent in ghetto

shacks. We missed the essence of the work—that Hansberry had created a family

on the cutting edge of the same class and ideological struggles as existed in the

movement itself and among the people. What is most telling about our ignorance

is that Hansberry’s play still remains overwhelmingly popular and evocative of

black and white reality, and the masses of black people dug it true. (19)

Although Baraka’s work signals a turn toward the destruction of form in the black theatre, as in his 1964 play Dutchman, he recognizes the power a more traditional work such as Hansberry’s has to express the African American spiritual reality—the reality of day to day “political agitation” (11). The same daily agitation embodied by Wilson’s Hill District characters in their banal acts of emplacement.

One of Baraka’s most potent criticisms of his own work in Dutchman is that, unlike

Hansberry, he is “too concerned with white people” in his play (19). Suzan-Lori Parks addresses the role of white people in an evolving black aesthetic in her essay “an Equation for Black

People Onstage.” In an ever-widening expression of a complex aesthetic (“There is no such thing as THE Black Experience”), Parks wonders if the black aesthetic has to rely upon the white other in order to be successful: “Does Black life consist of issues other than race issues?” (21). Parks

55 challenges the notion that a black theatre aesthetic must include a white oppressor, or include a white presence at all:

BLACK PEOPLE + “WHITEY” = STANDARD DRAMATIC CONFLICT (STANDARD TERRITORY)

i.e.

“BLACK DRAMA” = the presentation of the Black as oppressed

so that WHATEVER the dramatic dynamics, they are most often READ to EQUAL an explanation or relation of Black oppression. This is not only a false equation, this is bullshit. so that

BLACK PEOPLE + x = NEW DRAMATIC CONFLICT (NEW TERRITORY)

where x is the realm of situations showing African-Americans in states other than the Oppressed by/Obsessed with “Whitey” state; where the White when present is not the oppressor, and where audiences are encouraged to see and understand and discuss these dramas in terms other than that same old shit. (20)

Parks’ equation makes a way for her to “locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down”—to access her history through memory to tell her spiritual narrative (“Possession” 4).

Wilson’s aesthetic for his black theatre fulfills Parks’ new equation for black people onstage. His response to the old equation is a call for playwrights who don’t write attenuating narratives about an oppressed people, but narratives about people—human beings with their own memories, myths, and culinary traditions. He rejects narratives that assume white culture and black culture are interchangeable—that one could cast Arthur Miller’s domestic tragedies with

56 black actors and call it black theatre. To do this would be “to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans” (Wilson “Ground” 31). He rejects the cultural imperialism that would assimilate the black theatre into a European aesthetic. And he “reject[s] any attempt to blot us out, to reinvent history and ignore our presence or to maim our spiritual product” (31). Wilson’s

Pittsburgh Cycle is an expression of the black spirit enlivened by the memories of Africa, the

Middle Passage, and the slave quarters.

Wilson’s play-cycle was written over a twenty-five year period, beginning with the first drafts of Jitney in the late 1970s and ending with the final play of the play-cycle, Radio Golf, a few months before his death in 2005. In his final interview with Suzan-Lori Parks, Wilson addresses the genesis of his epic work. She asks if he envisioned the ten-play cycle “like a red carpet unrolling” after writing Jitney (24). His reply suggests an associative impulse rather than a linear one: “I work like this—in collages. I just write stuff down and pile it up, and when I get enough stuff I spread it out and look at it and figure out how to use it. . . . Just like working in collages, you shift it around and organize it” (25). Like other play-cycle playwrights, he didn’t conceive of the Pittsburgh Cycle as a whole until he had already written several individual plays.

Robert Schenkkan wrote a short play reacting to a weekend visit in Kentucky, later envisioning

The Kentucky Cycle. Tony Kushner intended to write Angels in America as one play in 1997, but because of the importance of his subject matter, he extended the work into two lengthy parts completed three years later. The first two parts of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play were completed years before she wrote the third part in 2004—its catalyst the impending 2004 election. Wilson tells Parks that after writing Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (the third play that made it to

Broadway in 1988 after Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 1984 and Fences in 1987) he realized he’d

“written three plays that were all set in different decades” and that he ought to see where it took him (24). More than any other play-cycle mentioned in this study, Wilson’s plays have the ability successfully to stand alone as complete narratives in performance. Their production history spans over thirty years, both as individual plays and in theatres that have produced the entire ten-play cycle over a stretch of several years. At the time of this writing, Jitney is the only play in the play-cycle that has not appeared on Broadway. It is, however, scheduled to premiere in early 2017 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, Joe

Turner’s Come and Gone, and The Piano Lesson opened on Broadway within a span of six years from 1984 to 1990—all to glowing reviews. Fences won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony

Award in 1987, and Wilson repeated his success when The Piano Lesson was awarded the

Pulitzer in 1990. Two Trains Running made its move from the Yale Repertory Theatre to

Broadway in 1992, and was followed by Seven Guitars in 1996 after it played at the Goodman

Theatre in Chicago and premiered at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center. Both Trains and

Guitars were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, but were bested by Schenkkan’s Kentucky Cycle

(1992) and Foote’s Young Man from Atlanta (1995) respectively. In regards to the Pulitzer Prize, the 1990s was a successful decade for play-cycles. Not only did Schenkkan’s Cycle win the 1992 award, in the following year Angels in America: Millennium Approaches won the Prize—all while Wilson’s plays appeared as finalists and winners.18 King Hedley II was a finalist in 2000 before it opened on Broadway in 2001. Gem of the Ocean, the first play in the chronology of the

18 The only other play-cycle to become a finalist for the Prize is Suzan-Lori Parks three-part cycle Father Comes Home from the Wars in 2015.

58 play-cycle opened in 2004, and Radio Golf, the final play, opened in 2007, a year and a half after

Wilson’s death.

While this performance history is necessary to situate Wilson’s work within the

American theatre, it also reflects his life-long rootedness to place. Like Foote, who spent his entire career writing about his hometown, Wilson made the subject of his play-cycle a place he knew intimately. The manner in which he and Foote wrote their play-cycles—in a collage of rituals and repetitions where the characters and ideas eventually piled up into narratives— suggests intimacy to places. One of the criticisms of Schenkkan’s Kentucky Cycle is that he attempted to write a place narrative about the land without being rooted in it. He spent one weekend in the Appalachian region, quickly formed his opinions of the problems and solutions, and returned to his home in Los Angeles to pen his nine-play cycle removed from the exploitations he attempted to address. He lacked the necessary banal repetitions in a location that would have helped him write a successful place narrative that acknowledged the complexities of the people and their place.19 Because Wilson’s play-cycle didn’t develop linearly (“like a red carpet unrolling”) he was able to affix his narrative to groupings of repetitive experiences— experiences that root a person to place.

19 Schenkkan’s play-cycle is not without its detractors. Wendell Berry has written an essay defending the people of Kentucky against Schenkkan’s attenuating treatment of the people and their land titled “The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity.” A group of Kentucky scholars also wrote a series of essays in 1999 titled Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes addressing what they viewed as a gross misrepresentation of their people and place. Despite these critiques, however, The Kentucky Cycle still receives accolades because of its Pulitzer-Prize win. The play-cycle was staggering in its scope and addressed environmental issues that were coming into focus. It had successful runs in both Seattle and Washington D. C. which resulted in its wining of the Pulitzer Prize—before it opened in New York. The play-cycle, however, never found its footing in the New York theatre, and closed after only thirty-three performances.

Wilson himself prioritized the first play of the cycle, Gem of the Ocean, because for the first time he embodied the previously only talked about Aunt Ester: “the most significant person of the cycle. The characters after all, are her children” (Wilson quoted in Elam xv).20 While it is the first play of the play-cycle (set in 1904), it is the penultimate play in Wilson’s writing, followed by the last play of the play-cycle, Radio Golf. The final two plays he wrote that begin and end the play-cycle are intended to

build an umbrella under which the rest of the plays can sit. My relating the ‘00s to

the ‘90s play should provide a bridge. The subject matter of these two plays is

going to be very similar and connected thematically, meaning that the other eight

will be part and parcel to these two. You should be able to see how they all fit

inside these last two plays. (xv)

Phylicia Rashad, the actress who premiered the role of Aunt Ester, called the play “an ode to community” (xxvii). Ester makes two important contributions to place-making: her house at

1839 Wylie Avenue where the community comes to have their souls washed (“They say you can help me. They say you wash people’s souls”) and conjuring the slave ship Gem of the Ocean and

The City of Bones where Citizen Barlow revisits the past to make sense of his present (20).

Harry J. Elam points out that Wilson makes The City of Bones (the ocean graveyard of Africans murdered during the Middle Passage) an actual place in the play rather than a “fixed moment in

20 Aunt Ester is talked about in Two Trains Running, Seven Guitars, King Hedley II, and Radio Golf. However, she only appears in Gem of the Ocean. Wilson told Rashad “he had not yet heard her speak” until he began to write Gem. Ester’s voice “was the beginning of Gem of the Ocean . . . the jewel of the cycle—the mother of all the plays” (xxvii-iii).

60 time that marks the difficult transition from free peoples into captive Africans in America” (235).

Aunt Ester makes it “a locality rather than [a] transitionality” (235):

It’s only a half mile by a half mile but that’s a city. It’s made of bones. Pearly

white bones. All the buildings and everything is made of bones. I seen it. I been

there, Mr. Citizen. My mother lives there. I got an aunt there and three uncles live

there down in that city made of bones. You want to go there, Mr. Citizen? I can

take you there if you want to go. (Gem 54-55)

Aunt Ester’s nearly three-hundred-year memory constructs a tangible place out of the bodies and bones of her enslaved ancestors.

Gem is set in the Wylie Avenue house of Aunt Ester, the two hundred and eighty-five- year-old former slave woman who is the spiritual and physical center of the Pittsburgh Cycle.

Citizen Barlow, who has come from Alabama, visits Ester and her housekeeper, Black Mary, to have his soul washed by the matriarch. Solly Two Kings, the sixty-seven-year-old former leader in the Underground Railroad, is also a frequent visitor to Aunt Ester’s home. Troubled by the treatment of laborers in a Pittsburgh mill, Solly burns the mill down. Caesar Wilks, Black Mary’s brother and the local constable, comes looking for Solly after his guilt is discovered, but the two women have helped him and Citizen Barlow escape town after Ester conjures visions of the Gem of the Ocean and The City of Bones in a healing ritual. Solly is shot by Caesar in a riot, and his body is brought back to Ester’s kitchen to be prepared for burial. As the play closes Citizen puts on Solly’s coat and hat, taking up his role as prophet and leader in the community. Aunt Ester has accomplished the healing Citizen and the community need.

While Aunt Ester is undoubtedly Wilson’s most pivotal character evoking memory and place, she plays a supporting role in the formation of place via food culture in Gem. Black Mary and her brother Caesar Wilks represent two opposing attempts at place-making through the preparation of food. Black Mary is both Aunt Ester’s housekeeper and protégé. While the matriarch provides for the spiritual needs of the community, Black Mary provides for their bodily needs—eventually continuing Ester’s role as the community’s cenotaph of memory:

“Miss Tyler passed it on to me. If you ever make up your mind I’m gonna pass it on to you”

(45). Black Mary’s most notable actions in the play are cutting Aunt Ester’s toenails, going out for groceries, cooking meals, and caring for anyone who enters the kitchen. She repeatedly inquires about everyone’s hunger and offers a bowl of soup or beans: “I asked her [Aunt Ester] did she want anything to eat she say no” (10). The food that Black Mary provides—cornbread, lima beans with ham hocks, pigfeet, bread, and biscuits—is always offered along with the opportunity to sit down and participate in the recitation of the community’s stories. Together, she and Ester create a session where the community comes to find a cure for displacement. When

Citizen Barlow arrives, he sneaks into the house through a window and “heads straight for the kitchen and finds the bread box” where he “grabs a piece of bread, stuffs it in his mouth, grabs another piece, stuffs it in his pocket” (20). Stealing bread seems like the only way to find a place in the blindness of his displacement; Ester, who enters the room as Citizen stuffs bread in his pocket, immediately asks him if he’s hungry and tells him, “Black Mary gone shopping. . . . She gonna make up a pot of soup when she come back” (20). Place doesn’t have to be stolen; it is freely offered at 1839 Wylie Avenue. Citizen’s reply to Aunt Ester’s offer of food—“I ain’t

62 looking for no money. I ain’t no robber. I come to see you”—is a plea for emplacement through a connection to the community and memory (21).

Early in the play Black Mary offers a loaf of bread to Rutherford Selig, a traveling peddler who provides frying pans and coffee pots, so he “won’t have to stop by Caesar’s bakery” on his way through (14). While Black Mary provides a place for community that requires no monetary exchange and subtly incites the memories of an agrarian past that Aunt Ester unfolds into conjuring the memories that heal the community, Caesar Wilks provides a false sense of place that neglects a memory of the past and embraces the industrialism that re-enslaves the community. When Caesar first meets Citizen, he attempts to negate his sister’s place-making attempts:

CAESAR. Keep your eye on him. That’s one you got to watch. Ain’t nothing

missing in there? He liable to steal the coffeepot.

BLACK MARY. Caesar, why don’t you leave him alone.

CAESAR. I ain’t saying nothing bad about him. I like him. He remind me of

myself when I was a young man. But if I was you I’d keep my eye on him. I’d

feed him in the yard. (34)

Caesar would have Citizen fed in the yard to undermine his emplacement. He even tries to get

Black Mary to leave Aunt Ester and work for him: “My sister a washer woman. Why don’t you come back to work for me at the bakery? You sitting up here under Aunt Ester just watching time go by. Aunt Ester ain’t got no time. She got both feet in the grave just waiting for the body to follow” (36-37). He doesn’t value the role his sister plays in providing an embodied place of memory for the community. Caesar’s primary concern is industrial value, and the disembodied

63 enslavement that comes with it.21 Black Mary worked with Caesar at one time when they were

“selling hoecakes” and “it wasn’t about Caesar or Black Mary. It was about the Wilks family”

(37). It ended when Caesar killed a boy for stealing bread—when he stopped valuing the bodies that made up the community:

BLACK MARY. It was a loaf of bread, Caesar. He was stealing a loaf of bread.

CAESAR. I gave him an opportunity to stop. I told him he was under arrest. He

started running! With the loaf of bread under his arm! I had to shoot him. You

can’t do nothing like that and get away with it. (38)

Now Caesar is “selling magic bread and overcharging rent” to his neighbors (37). Black Mary’s place-making session exalts the culinary values of the community, whereas Caesar’s industrial white bread devalues their history and their bodies:

CAESAR. This ain’t the country. I can’t wait till the crop come in. It’s taking

them a while but they learning. Yeah, I sell magic bread. Got a big sign say you

only have to eat half as much to get twice as full. And I charge one and a half

times for it. You don’t understand I give the people hope when they ain’t got

nothing else. They take that loaf of bread and make it last twice as long. They

wouldn’t do that if they didn’t pay one and a half times for it. I’m helping the

people. (37)

21 “CAESAR: Industry is what drive the country. Without industry wouldn’t nobody be working. That tin put people to work doing other things. These niggers can’t see that. They ought to be glad the mill is there. If it wasn’t for the mill these niggers wouldn’t have no way to pay their rent. Close down the mill and wait and see what happens then. I’ll tell you. A hundred niggers is going to jail for trying to steal something. . . . Some of these niggers was better off in slavery” (35-36).

Caesar’s industrial motivations come as no surprise in the conflict between industrialism and agrarianism that Wilson establishes in his play-cycle. Caesar is simply working within the status quo established by an industrial system that values humans as property that both consume and ought to be consumed. Kingsolver’s observation that “this drift away from our agricultural roots is a natural consequence of migration from the land to the factory, which is as old as the

Industrial Revolution” is salient to the promise of Caesar’s industrial magic bread (Animal 13).

The bread (like the apartments he overcharges for) represents another kind of slavery—an enslavement that disembodies (and displaces) the body: “This perverted miracle perpetrated against black people turns the miracle of capitalism into a black magic” (Nadel, “Beginning” 20).

Caesar sees black people as “niggers” to exploit as property that will increase his bottom line

(Gem 35). Emplacement can be sold for the inflated price of magic, hopeful bread.

Eventually Black Mary has to make a place for herself at Wylie Avenue. While Aunt

Ester indicates that Mary will eventually assume Ester’s role as the community’s memory-keeper

(a role Ester assumed herself), Mary has yet to make the house her own—an important action that predicates her declaration of the house as a “sanctuary” for Aunt Ester when Caesar comes to arrest her (82). Aunt Ester harasses Mary about the way she keeps house and cooks food:

“You got that stove too hot. Damp it down. You be done burnt down the place. . . . It’s too hot.

Damp it down! Take some of that wood off that fire” (77). Black Mary’s response solidifies her place in the house and allows her to declare it a sanctuary:

It’s been three years now I can’t do nothing to satisfy you. I may as well lay down

somewhere and forget about it. You got something to say about everything. Turn

the fire down. Wash the greens in the other pot. Shake that flour off that chicken. .

. . That ain’t enough salt. I’m tired of it! Your way ain’t the best way. I got my

own way and that’s the way I’m doing it. If I stay around here I’m doing it my

own way. (77)

The friction between the women and Aunt Ester’s knowing reply—“What took you so long?”— is a reminder that place-making requires a full range of dimension and direction from the people involved. Mary has to assert herself into Ester’s place, and Ester has to resist and eventually assent. The house can be a sanctuary—the ultimate place—because the women live within the complexity and history that predicates emplacement in depth.

Like Citizen Barlow, Herald Loomis in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is a vagabond as a result of southern enslavement and northern industrialism. The year is 1911 when “the fires of the steel mill rage with a combined sense of industry and progress”—progress that Wilson seems to consider false (Joe n.p.). The setting of Joe Turner is Bertha and Seth Holly’s Pittsburgh boarding house where the formerly enslaved move from their lives in the South to new troubles in the North. Herald steps onto the stage with his young daughter Zonia as “foreigners in a strange land, they carry as part and parcel of their baggage a long line of separation and dispersement which informs their sensibilities and marks their conduct as they search for ways to reconnect, to reassemble” (n.p.). The play follows Herald’s search for his wife Martha Loomis, and the way in which Bertha, Seth, and Bynum Walker participate in Herald’s search. Herald was displaced from his wife and daughter when he was captured by Joe Turner and re-enslaved:

LOOMIS. Got to find her for myself. Find my starting place in the world. Find me

a world I can fit in.

MATTIE. I ain’t never found no place for me to fit. Seem like all I do is start

over. It ain’t nothing to find no starting place in the world. You just start from

where you find yourself.

LOOMIS. Got to find my wife. That be my starting place. (76)

Finding Martha Loomis is the means by which Herald can become emplaced in the world. He must begin, however, with emplacement in his own body. At the boarding house he meets

Mattie, whom he tries to touch, but finds his displacement keeps him from having a relationship with her: “I done forgot how to touch” (77). Herald’s ongoing search is rewarded near the end of the play when Martha arrives on the morning he and Zonia plan to move on from Pittsburgh.

Rutherford Selig, a peddler and “People Finder,” has brought her to see her husband (88). When

Loomis sees his wife, he tells her he needed to see her face to “make sure everything still in its place” (89). Instead of going with her, he realizes he’s already found his place in the song that

Joe Turner took from him eleven years before. Martha tries to convince him to turn to

Christianity and find redemption in Christ’s blood. He refuses her pleadings and, instead, finds his redemption in his own blood. After years of wandering, his arrival at Seth and Bertha’s boarding house is “to be somewhere . . . to be in place and therefore to be subject to its power, to be part of its action, acting on its scene” (Casey 23). Loomis find his place through his complex relationship with the culinary events created by Bertha and Bynum (a “conjur man or rootworker”) in the somewhere of the Holly’s boarding house (Joe 4).

Elam identifies Loomis’ trauma as one of being displaced out of time:

His original trauma is the realization of being ripped out of time—a reenactment

of slavery, literally stolen out of the moment by Joe Turner and his henchman.

Traumatized by this condition of servitude, dislocated and alienated from the

world around him, Loomis seeks a starting place, a return to time past in order to

live in time present. (5)

He lost the present in the trauma of his past and Wilson’s cure for his displacement is through memory. Wilson uses Bertha to provide the culinary setting that will produce Loomis’ emplacement.

In many of Wilson’s plays the primary setting is a kitchen (or a diner in Two Trains

Running). Joe Turner is no exception. Nearly every scene opens with Bertha preparing food; offering biscuits, grits, and coffee; or clearing up the dishes from a just-eaten meal—she operates with abundance. Her portions are plentiful and nearly everyone is offered something to eat as soon as they enter the house: “My . . . my . . . Bertha, your biscuits getting fatter and fatter” (5).

In contrast, her husband Seth operates from a position of scarcity. He is miserly in his offerings, quick to remind everyone of the cost of food. From his position of scarcity, Seth is ready to throw Loomis out of the house after an abundant evening of dancing and Loomis’ vision of The

City of Bones—Loomis participates in and conjures up the vision through alcohol, Bertha’s fried chicken, and the rhythmic and ritualistic movement of his body. His vigorous embodiment angers Seth and he responds by trying to displace Loomis again:

The lights come up on the kitchen. BERTHA busies herself with breakfast

preparations. SETH sits at the table.

SETH. I don’t care what his problem is! He’s leaving here!

BERTHA. You can’t put the man out and he got that little girl. Where they gonna

go then?

SETH. I don’t care where he go. Let him go back where he was before he come

here. I ain’t asked him to come here. I knew when I first looked at him something

wasn’t right with him. Dragging that little girl around with him. Looking like he

be sleeping in the woods somewhere. I knew all along he wasn’t right. (57)

Bertha is opposed to Seth’s attempt to re-displace Loomis. Instead she makes Loomis a meal and saves it for his return:

SETH. Today’s Monday, Mr. Loomis. Come Saturday your time is up. We done

ate already. My wife roasted up some yams. She got your plate sitting in there on

the table. . . . (LOOMIS goes into the kitchen, where a plate of yams is covered

and set on the table. He sits down and begins to eat with his hands). (68)

Loomis has to bodily engage with the means of his place-making—he eats with his hands.

Bertha’s kitchen is the place where she prepares the conjuring feast that binds the community together:

BERTHA moves about the kitchen as though blessing it and chasing away the

huge sadness that seems to envelop it. It is a dance and demonstration of her own

magic, her own remedy that is centuries old and to which she is connected by the

muscles of her heart and the blood’s memory. (87)

Her magic is regularly consumed by the community in the biscuits, grits, and fried chicken she prepares. Although she isn’t directly involved in Loomis’ transformation at the conclusion of the play, Bertha’s culinary place-making activities provide a place for Bynum to help Loomis find his song.

Wilson establishes Bynum’s concerns with place in the opening scene. Seth narrates

Bynum’s activities in the yard: his comical attempt at corralling a pigeon, an ensuing conversation with the birds, drawing a conjuring circle, dancing his way through Seth’s vegetable patch, and the ritual sacrifice and burying of a pigeon. Bynum is connected to the soil because of his profession as a conjurer and enters the scene with an armload of “weeds”—roots used for his conjuring activities (5). His role as the “Binder of What Clings” involves binding people to their place, often binding one person to another: “I takes the power of my song and binds them together. . . . That’s why they call me Bynum. Just like glue I sticks people together”

(10). He knows that people are often displaced because they are in the wrong place: “Sometimes you got to be where you supposed to be. Sometimes you can get all mixed up in life and come to the wrong place” (45). But Bynum knows Loomis’ malady is having no place at all. Joe Turner stole his place when he re-enslaved him and took his song:

BYNUM. Now, I can look at you, Mr. Loomis, and see you a man who done

forgot his song. Forgot how to sing it. A fellow forget that and he forget who he

is. Forget how he’s supposed to mark down life. . . . See, Mr. Loomis, when a

man forgets his song he goes off in search of it . . . till he find out he’s got it with

him all the time. That’s why I can tell you one of Joe Turner’s niggers. ‘Cause

you forgot how to sing your song. . . . Every nigger he catch he’s looking for the

one he can learn that song from. Now he’s got you bound up to where you can’t

sing your own song. Couldn’t sing it them seven years ‘cause you was afraid he

would snatch it from under you. But you still got it. You just forgot how to sing it.

(71, 73)

Loomis’ song is deeply buried within his body’s memory—Bynum knows this, and has bound

Zonia and her mother together so Loomis can find his place: “I just wanna see her face so I can get me a starting place in the world. The world got to start somewhere. That’s what I been looking for. I been wandering a long time in somebody else’s world. When I find my wife that be the making of my own” (72). When Bynum’s binding works and Martha arrives Loomis realizes his place is not with her—his disorientation runs deep, and he is “bound up to the road” (90). His place (his song) is in his own body—the one Joe Turner stole and enslaved. As the play closes,

Loomis cuts himself and discovers his body when he contacts his blood on his own terms: “Free from any encumbrance other than the workings of his own heart and the bonds of the flesh, having accepted the responsibility for his own presence in the world” (94). He is set free from his displacement through his emplacement in his own body.

Ma Rainey is indeed the most riveting character in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom but enters fairly late in the play, appearing onstage for a relatively short amount of time. Although she is the title character and a woman of great power that looms large above the narrative, it is her role as an African American woman making her place in the public sphere and having power because of her independence that makes her so compelling. There is a good deal of criticism against

Wilson for a perceived marginalization of women in his plays. Wilson’s defense suggests that he simply didn’t know how to adequately represent women: “It probably has to do with the fact that

I’m a man. I do create some black women characters and try to be honest in their creation, but it’s hard to put myself in their space. I don’t know. . . . It’s very hard to do” (Wilson quoted in

Elam 89). Both his critic and defender, Harry Elam addresses Wilson’s lacuna in his essay “The

Woman Question,” acknowledging that “in Wilson’s (w)righting [sic], the domestic becomes a

71 site that is both problematic and enabling for female characters” (89). Ma Rainey’s role is as a woman who is both at the mercy of the white, commercial, musical establishment and as an

African American woman who wields power because she has independence apart from the domestic space. She is the fuller expression of a woman who doesn’t carry the traditional domestic duties. In Ma Rainey it isn’t the women who use the language of domesticity, rather it is the men who tell stories of food preparation and place-making.

The play takes place in a Chicago recording studio where two white producers are preparing the studio for Ma Rainey’s arrival. Her band arrives and the four men (Toledo, Cutler,

Slow Drag, and Levee) play music, argue, and eat while they wait. Sturdyvant, the producer, has already decided he wants to use Levee’s adaptation of Ma Rainey’s music because it will sell better. When Ma Rainey finally arrives, it is fairly evident she, Sturdyvant, and the members of her band are in disagreement about how the music will be performed. The disagreement finally comes to a head when Ma asserts her artistic control and fires Levee because he won’t play her music the way she wants. In the closing moments of the play as the band is packing up to leave, with considerably less pay than they had been promised in their pockets, Toledo accidentally steps on Levee’s shoes. Levee stabs the older man and the play closes with Levee apologizing and whimpering on the studio floor.

Ma Rainey, while being the only play in the cycle not set in Pittsburgh, is also one of three plays in the play-cycle not set in any place that could be interpreted as a domestic locale.

Ma Rainey, Jitney, and Radio Golf are set in places of public labor.22 Although Ma Rainey isn’t

22 Two Trains Running is set in a diner. I interpret this space as an extrapolation of a domestic space.

72 set in a domestic locale, discussions of food abound in Toledo’s storytelling.23 Wilson uses the discussion of food preparation as a way of creating place in a public locale—it becomes a site of resistance against displacement.

Like Citizen and Loomis before him, Levee embodies the displacement of the African

American man. Levee is out of place in his musical community—he tries to succeed with a shallow knowledge of his history, and he feels invalidated as an artist. Toledo attempts to help him find his place in the history of his people, not just his most immediate history:

TOLEDO. That’s African.

SLOW DRAG. (suspiciously) What? What you talking about? What’s African?

LEVEE. (defensively) I know he ain’t talking about me. You don’t see me

running around in no jungle with no bone between my nose.

TOLEDO. Levee, you worse than ignorant. You ignorant without a premise. (Ma

20)

Levee is well acquainted with his own immediate history—his mother’s gang rape by a group of white men, and his father’s subsequent revenge and disappearance. But Toledo wants him to look deeper into the past and consider himself part of the larger African American history and community’s resistance:

TOLEDO. Levee, you just about the most ignorant nigger I know. Sometimes I

wonder why I even bother to try and talk with you.

23 All of Wilson’s plays contain an oracular character that, along with the women, are critical in establishing place— Elam dedicates an entire chapter to these “fools.” In the plays that aren’t set in a domestic space, men play a more significant role in making place for the displaced. In these plays the women seem to be emissaries from a marginal world. They, like Elam’s “fools,” are oracular.

LEVEE. Well, what is you doing? Talking that shit to me about I’m ignorant!

What is you doing! You just a whole lot of mouth. A great big windbag. Thinking

you smarter than everybody else. What is you doing, huh?

TOLEDO. It ain’t just me, fool! It’s everybody! What you think . . . I’m gonna

solve the colored man’s problems by myself? I said, we. You understand that?

We. That’s every living colored man in the world got to do his share. Got to do

his part. I ain’t talking about what I’m gonna do . . . or what you or Cutler or Slow

Drag or anybody else. I’m talking about all of us together. What all of us is gonna

do. That’s what I’m talking about, nigger. (29)

Toledo tries to convince Levee that his place is located in a vast, complex community but Levee is unwilling to recognize his connection to a more protracted African American history. Toledo tries to remind him he comes from somewhere beyond his ancestors’ enslavement. Wilson also uses the contrast between Levee and Toledo’s costume to show the characters’ varied approaches to their history:

LEVEE. Nigger got them clod-hoppers! Old brogans! He ain’t nothing but a

sharecropper. (LEVEE and SLOW DRAG laugh.)

TOLEDO. You can make all the fun you want. It don’t mean nothing. I’m

satisfied with them and that’s what counts.

LEVEE. Nigger, why don’t you get some decent shoes? Got nerve to put on a suit

and tie with them farming boots. (27)

The conflict over Toledo’s sharecropper shoes and Levee’s Florsheims quickly escalates into

Levee’s stabbing Toledo at the end of the play: “You fucked up my shoe! You stepped on my

74 shoe with them raggedy-ass clodhoppers!” (88). Toledo’s death leaves Levee without the stories that help him find a way back and, consequently, without a place.

Levee’s invalidation as an artist by other members of Ma Rainey’s band contributes to his displacement. When Slow Drag is simply concerned about being paid for his time, Levee retorts with, “That ain’t what I’m talking about, nigger. I’m talking about art!” (15). Like Ma Rainey,

Levee wants to be valued as an artist unexploited by the market or a white oppressor. Ironically, it’s Ma Rainey who fires him for improvising: “You supposed to play the song the way I sing it.

The way everybody else play it. You ain’t supposed to go off by yourself and play what you want” (79). Levee’s artistic displacement is further exacerbated when he is exiled from the band.

Wilson inserts a scene in the middle of the play in which he resurrects a domestic space through a food narrative. Toledo’s memory extends past the three hundred years of enslavement on American soil into African culinary history. His improvisation on “leftovers” is an attempt to help Levee find his place through memory: “That’s what you is. That’s what we all is. A leftover from history” (40). Toledo tells the story of an African stew composed of ingredients that represent the history of the tribes enslaved and brought to America—carrots, peas, potatoes, meat, nuts, okra, and corn:

Now you take and eat the stew you take and make your history with that stew.

Alright. Now it’s over. Your history’s over and you done ate the stew. But you

look around and you see some carrots over here, some potatoes over there. That

stew’s still there. You done made your history and it’s still there. You can’t eat it

all. So what you got? You got some leftovers. That’s what it is. You got some

leftovers and you can’t do nothing with it. You already making you another

history . . . cooking you another meal, and you don’t need them leftovers no more.

What to do? See, we’s the leftovers. The colored man is the leftovers. Now what’s

the colored man gonna do with himself? That’s what we waiting to find out. But

first we gotta know we the leftovers. (41)

Wilson’s discussion of African American culinary culture as one of “making do” with the leftovers (the feet, ears, tails, and intestines) is suggested in Toledo’s identification of the

“colored man” as a leftover of history. His culinary narrative establishes a starting place, a formative narrative from which Levee can understand his past and decipher his place in the present. Levee is distracted by the minutia—the nuts in the stew—and is unable to reorient to his past: “I got lost there trying to figure out who puts nuts in their stew” (42). But Toledo includes the nuts to establish a deeper place in the past:

They put nuts in their stew all over Africa. But the stew they eat, and the stew

your grandpappy made, and all the stew that you and me eat . . . ain’t in noway

the same stew. That’s the way that go. I’m through with it. That’s the last you

know me to ever try and explain something to you. (42)

The lost culinary expression of nuts in the stew speaks of the displacement of Toledo, Levee, and their ancestors. The deeper African culinary place is lost; no amount of storytelling from Toledo can resurrect it. His narrative of a past place told to emplace Levee sounds like thin nostalgia to the younger man: “I don’t feel like rehearsing. I ain’t nothing but a leftover. You go and rehearse with Toledo . . . he’s gonna teach you how to make a stew” (42). Levee interprets Toledo’s attempt to narrate history through the memory of ancestral culinary ways as a futile nostalgic pining for a lost time. Casey’s observation that nostalgia is a “symptom of the profound

76 placelessness of our times, in which we have exchanged place for a mess of spatial and temporal pottage” is seen in Levee’s reaction to Toledo’s story (38). Because of his displacement Levee can only interpret Toledo’s memory as nostalgia—to the displaced all reminders of place are nostalgic. Levee is nostalgically looking for somewhere else rather than taking the complex and confusing stew Toledo offers.

As he did in Gem and Joe Turner, Wilson sets The Piano Lesson in a traditional domestic space. What makes The Piano Lesson different from the other two plays with interior kitchen and living-room settings, however, is that a man functions as the primary caretaker of food preparation—for this play, the primary agent of place-making. In the same way Wilson uses

Toledo in Ma Rainey to make a place, in The Piano Lesson the playwright renegotiates the traditional role of women as the primary agents of domestic life by giving Doaker Charles the role of culinary caretaker and place-maker.

The play takes place in 1937 in Doaker Charles’ kitchen and parlor where the centerpiece of the setting is a one hundred and thirty-seven-year-old upright piano whose façade has been carved with African totems. Wilson describes the piano’s carvings as having been “rendered with a grace and power of invention that lifts them out of the realm of craftsmanship and into the realm of art” (Piano n.p.). As the title suggests, the piano is both the centerpiece of the play’s setting as well as the centerpiece of its conflict. Boy Willie, Doaker’s nephew, and his friend

Lymon arrive from Mississippi with a truckload of watermelons to sell. Willie has come to

Pittsburgh to convince his sister Berniece (who lives with her uncle Doaker and her eleven-year- old daughter Maretha) to sell the piano and give him half the proceeds so that he can buy a piece of property in Mississippi on which their ancestors were enslaved. While she no longer plays the

77 piano—the memories associated with its origins are too painful for her to face—she refuses to sell the piano. In the midst of the family conflict over the piano, Wilson introduces a spiritual element that demonstrates the syncretic religion that Africans developed in America: the appearance of the ghost Sutter, the recently deceased owner of the property Boy Willie wants to purchase. While Sutter never physically appears onstage as a ghost, both Berniece and Boy

Willie see him. The play develops Berniece’s relationships with her brother, her suitor Avery

(who wants to marry her and also attempts an exorcism on the piano), and Lymon (with whom she has a brief romantic encounter). The play reaches its climax when Avery attempts his exorcism of the spirits of Berniece and Boy Willie’s ancestors that reside in the piano. His attempts are futile, and eventually Boy Willie has to struggle with the ghost while Berniece has to encounter their history as she sings and plays the piano to drive away the spirits. She and her brother succeed and Boy Willie returns to Mississippi with Wining Boy.

Wilson’s opening description of the play’s setting suggests that there is shared agency in the home between Doaker Charles and his niece Berniece, but because of Doaker’s proximity to the kitchen and his role as the primary facilitator of the culinary narrative, he emerges as the facilitator of the emplacement of Boy Willie and Berniece:

The action of the play takes place in the kitchen and parlor of the house where

DOAKER CHARLES lives with his niece, BERNIECE, and her eleven-year-old

daughter, MARETHA. The house is sparsely furnished, and although there is

evidence of a woman’s touch, there is a lack of warmth and vigor. BERNIECE

and MARETHA occupy the upstairs rooms. DOAKER’s room is prominent and

opens into the kitchen. (n.p.)

The prominence of Doaker’s room, its direct entrance into the kitchen, and the audience’s inaccessibility to Berniece’s room suggests the place-making role Doaker plays through the domestic function of the kitchen. Wilson further describes him as having “for all intents and purposes retired from the world though he works as a full-time railroad cook” (1). Doaker has been an employee of the railroad for twenty-seven years—first as a track-layer and now as a cook. In a lengthy speech about the comings and goings of the railroad and the incessant wandering movement it encourages, Doaker concludes with his opinion about the effects of such movement:

They got so many trains out there they have a hard time keeping them from

running into each other. Got trains going every whichaway. Got people on all of

them. Somebody going where somebody just left. If everybody stay in one place I

believe this would be a better world. (19)

Doaker’s monologue (a hallmark of Wilson’s plays) is followed by his offer of a slice of toasted bread to his listeners. Doaker has grown world-weary from industrialism and placelessness, but has found his place (even on a train) in the repeated sessions food preparation provides. Wilson puts the narrative of the families’ resistance to their enslavement in Doaker’s mouth. Like Bertha in Joe Turner, he provides the essential setting in which displaced characters move toward emplacement in their bodies. He mediates the mutual emplacement of his niece Berniece and his nephew Boy Willie.

As the title suggests, the play’s conflict is over a piano whose narrative is carved into its body—the ancestral narrative of a family split up by the displacing effects of slavery. The family’s narrative is embedded in the beautiful coloring of the wood:

Mama Ola polished this piano with her tears for seventeen years. For seventeen

years she rubbed on it till her hands bled. Then she rubbed the blood in . . . mixed

it up with the rest of the blood on it. Every day that God breathed life into her

body she rubbed and cleaned and polished and prayed over it. (52)

Although Boy Willie wants to sell the piano, Berniece is unwilling to part with it even though she never plays it—not because the piano nostalgically reminds her of a sentimental past, but because she is caught in the tension of trying to remember the past and forget it. The piano has a mystical power over her that reminds her of a place in history she simultaneously embraces and rejects:

When my mama died I shut the top on that piano and I ain’t never opened it since.

I was only playing it for her. . . . I used to think them pictures came alive and

walked though the house. Sometime late at night I could hear my mama talking to

them. I said that wasn’t gonna happen to me. I don’t play that piano cause I don’t

want to wake them spirits. They never be walking around in this house. . . . I got

Maretha playing on it. She don’t know nothing about it. Let her go on and be a

schoolteacher or something. She don’t have to carry all of that with her. She got a

chance I didn’t have. I ain’t gonna burden her with that piano. (70)

Berniece silences the spirits of her ancestors by disembodying herself from the piano (she won’t go near it); she silences her history by keeping the story of the piano from her daughter. She believes her daughter will have a better chance of remaining emplaced if she is ignorant of her history of displacement. Berniece’s displacement results in the tension between her intractability against playing the piano and her inability to sell it.

Boy Willie arrives in Pittsburgh from Mississippi with a truckload of watermelons he hopes to sell to finance his purchase of land. Wilson reorients a conception of place in this play when he turns Boy Willie’s desire for land into an externalization of his displacement. But he will be further displaced by possessing this particular piece of land at the expense of his embodied history in the piano. He thinks possessing the piece of land on which his ancestors were enslaved will cure him:

I ain’t talking about selling my soul. I’m talking about trading that piece of wood

for some land. Get something under your feet. Land the only thing God ain’t

making no more of. You can always get you another piano. I’m talking about

some land. What you get something out the ground from. That’s what I’m talking

about. You can’t do nothing with that piano but sit up there and look at it. (50)

To Boy Willie, the piano (his history) is a commodity that can be sold for profit and invested in another commodity—a piece of land. But he plans to sell the piano as evidence of his memory

(his place) in an attempt to eradicate the past (taking back the land). He wants to make a place by making a profit off the bodies of his ancestors. The piano is just a piano to Willie—something to look at—but Wilson uses the piano itself and the spirits of Willie and Berniece’s ancestors to help the family find their place with one another.

Notably, in the middle of Boy Willie’s lengthy rant about the uselessness of the piano and the value of the land, Bernice offers to cook a pork chop for another minor character (Wining

Boy) in what appears to be a throwaway line—the scene never returns to either Berniece making the food or to Wining Boy eating it. But immediately after she offers the pork chop to Wining

Boy, she tells the story about Mama Ola working her blood into the piano, then she physically

81 attacks her brother in retaliation for her husband’s death. As she deepens her place through the offer of food to Wining Boy, she finds the courage to expose herself to the horrific history of her family.

The mutual emplacement of brother and sister at the end of the play comes about explicitly in the mystical confrontation of the family’s displacer, Sutter, in the place Doaker has created through food and stories. Berniece finally plays the piano, singing loudly to call upon her ancestors for help in exorcising Sutter’s ghost while Boy Willie physically struggles with the ghost. The exorcism ends as Berniece sings, Boy Willie struggles, and “the sound of a train approaching is heard”—reminding the audience of Doaker’s persistent presence in this place

(107). Doaker has turned the house and the train into places that will heal his family’s displacement through his culinary place-making. Only a few lines later, and with noticeably little fanfare, Boy Willie decides to leave without the piano and his remaining watermelons:

BOY WILLIE. Wining Boy, you ready to go back down home? Hey, Doaker,

what time the train leave?

DOAKER. You still got time to make it.

BOY WILLIE. Hey Berniece . . . if you and Maretha don’t keep playing on that

piano . . . ain’t no telling . . . me and Sutter both liable to be back. (108)

Doaker facilitates both Berniece and Boy Willie’s emplacement—Berniece’s emplacement to the house and the piano, and Boy Willie’s emplacement back in Mississippi. Berniece reconnects with her ancestry by decreasing her distance from the piano and physically interacting with it;

Boy Willie reconnects with his ancestry by decreasing his distance from Sutter’s ghost and

82 letting go of the false emplacement found in property ownership. They discover that to be in the body is to be absolutely in place.

Three of the first four plays in the cycle (with Ma Rainey as the only exception) take place in interior domestic settings; The Piano Lesson is the last play in the whole play-cycle set in this locale. From this point in the play-cycle, the domestic sphere moves out of the house into the yard or a place of public commerce. With this move, the unfolding narrative of displacement and emplacement is pushed out of the confines of the house and into a public place. In Wilson’s publically located plays, he also uses food as a way of delimiting the space—of locating a place.

Casey’s observation about the relational nature of the body to its environment is useful for an understanding of how Wilson positions the body in public or outdoor spaces to make place:

The more one considers space as unlimited . . . the less one will be concerned

with the position of the human body in the vastness of space. Only if explicit

attention is given to the lived body in relation to its whereabouts does the

importance of place in distinction to space become fully evident. (46)

The characters’ lived body becomes the focus of the plays when they engage in acts of eating.

Wilson puts the focus on their bodies in outdoor and public spaces where space is unlimited. In doing so he delimits the space into place through the embodied act of eating. Seven Guitars is the first of the three outdoor plays in the play-cycle, along with Fences and King Hedley II, in which

Wilson shows the relationship of the body to its whereabouts and how that relationship makes place. Specifically, how do marginal characters create a session through food?

The most readily identifiable marginal character in Wilson’s cycle is what Elam calls the

“fool”—characters that represent “innocence and irrationality” and “embody a godliness” (58).

They are placed “on the margins, outside behavioral norms and on the periphery of their play’s central conflicts” where they provide “a potential for a cure by embracing the madness of black life in ways that prove regenerative” (63). In the tension of their madness, these characters simultaneously embody displacement (they exist outside of normative behavior and often wander) as well as a radical emplacement in their marginal places. When they do attain emplacement, they do it through marginal methods that confirm their outsider status. Elam identifies the genesis of this oracular character first in the stuttering nephew of Ma Rainey,

Sylvester, followed by Hedley (Seven Guitars), Gabriel (Fences), Hambone (Two Trains

Running), and Stool Pigeon (King Hedley II). Additionally, one could place Old Joe in Radio

Golf in this genesis. Wilson uses these “seem[ingly] naïve and deficient” characters “to heal, symbolically, the whole community through their actions” (5). Importantly, the running theme in these marginal characters’ narratives is the importance of food—often presented alongside female characters who also use food to make a place.

Seven Guitars is the only play in which Wilson uses a flashback. The play is bracketed by two scenes after Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton’s funeral in the backyard of a two-story brick home littered with the “evidence of food and drink” (Guitars 7). The remainder of the play is a flashback to a week before the funeral, beginning with Floyd’s return to the neighborhood after his release from prison and his recent rise to musical notoriety. He’s come home to the tenement house in the Hill District to re-win the affections of Vera Dodson. Wilson’s madman Hedley lives upstairs and runs a business selling chicken sandwiches out of the backyard. The play reaches its climax when Canewell discovers a stash of hidden cash under a bush in the backyard.

Floyd catches him with it and reveals that it’s money he and a friend had stolen. Hedley

84 discovers Floyd and in his madness cuts his throat with a machete. The play ends back in the yard after the funeral where Floyd’s song “That’s All Right” can be heard playing inside the house. Floyd’s friends discuss the strange circumstances of his murder, wondering who was responsible, while Vera recounts her vision of Floyd rising out of the casket into the air as she waved goodbye to him.

Vera and Louise are the primary preparers of food like Black Mary in Gem, Bertha in Joe

Turner, and Rose in Fences, and therefore play an important role in the establishment of place.

The play is set in the backyard of a two-story brick house shared by Vera, Louise, and Hedley.

The yard is frequently the site of eating and food preparation. The two women consistently offer the men food from their shared provisions, and at one point create an important session between one another. Louise wearily returns from the grocery store with an armload of provisions:

LOUISE. What are you going to cook, Vera?

VERA. Chicken. Potatoes and green beans. And some cornbread. Floyd likes his

cornbread.

FLOYD. I can eat a whole pan of cornbread. I like cornbread. I like my chicken

too. I can eat two or three chickens.

LOUISE. I can look at you and see that.

VERA. I’ll fix you up a plate when I cook it up.

LOUISE. That be nice. That way I won’t have to cook. (21)

While this exchange might seem inconsequential like the bread pudding scene in Radio Golf, it establishes an important placed relationship between the two women—characters who are often marginal in Wilson’s plays. They provide consistency and a “position of stability and economic

85 independence” in this community of seven people (Elam 103). Unlike the men in the play, both are employed and retain their independence because of their income—there would be no place in this play if not for Vera and Louise.

Wilson, however, uses his oracular fool, Hedley, to delimit the space through marginal methods. Whereas the women prepare their food inside the house, Hedley has his own self-made food preparation system in the yard in sight of the audience:

Off to the side and in the back of the yard is a contraption made of bricks, wood

and corrugated sheet metal, which is where HEDLEY kills chickens. It doubles as

a grill for cooking and when it is not being used, it breaks down with a minimum

of parts left standing. During several of his scenes HEDLEY builds or dismantles

his contraption and stores its pieces in the cellar. (Hedley 6)

Hedley uses his contraption both to kill and to cook the chickens he uses for his business (he sells eggs and chicken sandwiches) in front of the other characters and the audience.24 His food preparation differs from Vera and Louise’s (who go to the grocery store several times in the play) because his requires an embodied relationship with the source of his food. He does the

24 Hedley doesn’t kill the chickens in sight of the audience, but he does slit the throat of a troublesome rooster and ritualistically spills its blood at the close of the first half. By way of establishing Hedley’s mad, oracular voice, Wilson gives him a prophetic speech during the rash beheading of the animal: “You want or you don’t want, it don’t matter. God ain’t making no more roosters. It is a thing past. Soon you mark my words when God ain’t making no more niggers. They too be a done thing. This here rooster born in the barnyard. He learn to cock his doodle do. He see the sun, he cry out so the sun don’t catch you with your hand up your ass or your dick stuck in your woman. You hear this rooster you know you alive. You be glad to see the sun cause there come a time sure enough when you see your last day and this rooster you don’t hear no more. (He takes out a knife and cuts the rooster’s throat.) That be for the living. Your black ass be dead like the rooster now. You mark what Hedley say. (He sprinkles the blood in a circle.) This rooster too good live for your black asses. (He throws the rooster on the ground.) Now he good and right for you” (69). Not only does this event foreshadow Hedley’s eventual murder of Floyd at the end of the play but, more importantly, “his scattering of the rooster’s blood in a circle functions as a ritual aimed at shaking the gathered community out of its passivity” (Elam 66). It also shakes the viewing audience out of their passivity and causes them to consider “persistent, collective, revolutionary action” in the face of repeated displacement—his action is too intimate and too bloody to ignore (66).

86 dirty work of slaughtering his own chickens to the disgust of Louise: “If he start killing them chickens I’m going into the house” (26). His embodied engagement with the food he cooks, and the spilling of blood in this backyard, serves to radically intersect his lived body with its whereabouts. Unlike the displaced modern, he doesn’t exhibit the “degradation and obsolescence of the body” (Berry, Commonplace 75). As a result his relationship with food is not nostalgic— killing the chickens to feed his body and the bodies of his community is a simple necessity.

Hedley’s non-nostalgic relationship with food—and his community—results from his acknowledgement of the place he necessarily shares with his neighbors and his chickens.

If Wilson’s fools serve a special spiritual function in the community, it stands to reason that this function is accomplished through the use of their bodies—an intimate relationship exists between their bodies, their spirits, and their whereabouts. Wendell Berry explains this intimate connection in his essay “The Body and the Earth”:

Our bodies are also not distinct from the bodies of other people, on which they

depend in a complexity of ways from biological to spiritual. They are not distinct

from the bodies of plants and animals, with which we are involved in the cycles of

feeding and in the intricate companionships of ecological systems and of the

spirit. (Unsettling 103)

For Hedley, as for Wilson’s other fools, there is no separation between the body and the spirit.

There is an essential acknowledgement that these things are connected, and that connection helps them to delimit the space for other characters. Steven C. Tracy, in his essay “The Holyistic Blues of Seven Guitars” suggests the importance of this holism and its place-making effects:

“Supernatural elements in Wilson’s plays indicate a deep interest in spirituality as well, but a

87 worldly spirituality that eschews the sacred-secular dichotomy in favor of a spirituality that is of this world, firmly rooted in the daily particulars of the lives of African Americans” (51). When

Hedley ritualistically kills a rooster and scatters its blood while prophesying the future eradication of the black body, it is a spiritual act as well as one “rooted in the daily particulars”—the rooster is annoying and Hedley wants it silenced. When he slaughters chickens and cooks them on his sheet-metal altar, it is both spiritual and physical. It is a spiritual act, because it mirrors his ritual sacrifice of the rooster in the previous scene, and a physical act, because he makes a place by creating a culinary session between himself and the community. He feeds the community spiritually and physically in the same way Black Mary is destined to do, not in her private domestic space but in a publicly violent way. When Hedley cuts Floyd’s throat in sight of the audience (just as he had done the rooster) he eliminates the displacing Floyd who cheated on Vera, robbed, and murdered—he “has betrayed black communality and disserved the legacy and the power of the blues” (Elam 72).25 Wilson uses Hedley to cure Floyd’s disregard and displacement of his community.

25 Vera tells Floyd how he displaced her from her body when he left: “You never showed me all those places where you were a man. You went to Pearl Brown and you showed her. I don’t know what she did or didn’t do but I looked up and you was back here after I had given you up. After I had walked through an empty house for a year and a half looking for you. After I would lay myself out on that bed and search my body for your fingertips. He touched me here. Floyd touched me here and he touched me here and he touched me here and he kissed me here and he gave me here and he took here and he ain’t here he ain’t here he ain’t here quit looking for him cause he ain’t here he’s there! there! there! there!” (19-20). There is directionally opposite of here—for Vera having Floyd here is to have him in place. Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinction between here and there in Space and Place further explains the displacement Vera feels at the thereness of Floyd: “A distinction that all people recognize is between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ We are here; we are this happy breed of men. They are there; they are not fully human and they live in that place. Members within the we-group are close to each other, and they are distant from members of the outside (they) group. Here we see how the meanings of ‘close’ and ‘distant’ are a compound of degrees of interpersonal intimacy and geographical distance” (50). Here is to be in place—us. There is to be in space—them: unlimited and rootless.

Fences is probably Wilson’s best-known play in the Pittsburgh Cycle. It appears in most undergraduate theatre history anthologies, often representing the slim focus on the African

American theatre and aesthetic in most anthologies. The play is set in 1957 in Rose and Troy

Maxon’s yard in front of their two-story brick house. The front porch and the partially fenced in front yard are the place and subject of the play’s conflict—the place is unfinished: “the porch lacks congruence” and “a wooden sawhorse, a pile of lumber, and other fence-building equipment” litter the yard (Fences 7). Troy’s unfinished fence, which Rose hounds him to finish, represents Rose’s desire to make a place with Troy and their son Cory, as well as represents the barriers Troy builds between himself and his family and his inability to make a place with them.

Troy is described as a “large man”: “it is this largeness that he strives to fill out and make an accommodation with” (7). His figure looms over the play as a man displaced by his sharecropping father, his fifteen years in prison, and his inability to achieve the American Dream when segregation and age kept him from playing Major League baseball. His own displacement leads him to displace everyone around him. The play traces his tenuous relationship with his wife and two sons. When Cory anticipates the arrival of a college football recruiter, Troy tells him not to waste his life on football or college but to learn a trade instead and get a job at the local grocery store. Cory eventually leaves home and joins the military, only to return at the end of the play (eight years after the opening) to pay his respects at his father’s funeral. Troy’s friend Bono reveals Troy’s secret that he is having an affair with Alberta whom he later reveals he has gotten pregnant. His infidelity eventually breaks an already threatened marriage.

After finding out about Troy’s child, his refusal to sign papers for Cory to play football, and the signature that put his mentally ill brother Gabriel in a mental institution, Rose stops

89 speaking to her husband. It isn’t until Raynell is born that Rose decides she will open her heart to the child and allow Troy to stay. Several times in the play Wilson uses Troy’s saga of his ongoing feud with Mr. Death to foreshadow his eventual death after the play’s climax. Troy and

Cory argue when Cory accuses his father of intentionally holding him back. Troy threatens his son, and Cory picks up a bat to defend himself—both men realize Cory is strong enough to beat his father. He kicks him out of the yard and tells him to never come back. As the scene ends,

Troy swings the bat in the air as he resumes his feud with Death: “Come on! It’s between you and me now! Come on! Anytime you want! Come on! I be ready for you . . . but I ain’t gonna be easy” (83). The final scene of the play occurs eight years later at Troy’s funeral: Raynell is seven, Cory returns home to see his mother, and Rose acknowledges the complexity of her relationship with Troy—the way he sucked the life out of her, and the way he gave all he had to

Raynell. The play ends with Gabriel’s vision of the gates of heaven opening for Troy’s arrival.

Like so many of the women before her in the Cycle, Rose provides the culinary establishment of place in Fences. She makes biscuits for Gabriel (the play’s fool) and frets over his insufficient eating habits, enticing him to eat in every one of his scenes; she makes meatloaf and sandwiches for her son Cory; she offers Lyons, her husband Troy’s oldest son, short ribs and eggs; she prepares chicken, collard greens, lima beans, cornbread, watermelon, cake—a whole litany of food—for Troy. Although Rose is the primary place-maker in the play (and Troy is the primary displacer), she struggles to feel in place herself—feeling utterly displaced in Troy’s presence. She reveals to Cory at the end of the play after Troy’s death,

Here is a man that can fill all them empty spaces you been tipping around the

edges of. One of them empty spaces was being somebody’s mother. I married

your daddy and settled down to cooking his supper and keeping clean sheets on

the bed. When your daddy walked through the house he was so big he filled it up.

That was my first mistake. Not to make him leave some room for me. For my part

in the matter. But at that time I wanted that. I wanted a house that I could sing in.

And that’s what your daddy gave me. I didn’t know to keep up his strength I had

to give up little pieces of mine. I did that. I took on his life as mine and mixed up

the pieces so that you couldn’t hardly tell which was which anymore. (90)

Rose got what she wanted—to be a mother—but in the process a man too big for his own house displaced her. Troy also displaced his son Cory:

Papa was like a shadow that followed you everywhere. It weighed on you and

sunk into your flesh. I would wrap around you and lay there until you couldn’t tell

which on was you anymore. That shadow digging in your flesh. Trying to crawl

in. Trying to live through you. Everywhere I looked, Troy Maxon was staring

back at me . . . . I’m just saying I’ve got to find a way to get rid of that shadow,

Mama. (89)

At the end of the play, both Rose and Corey become emplaced through Troy’s young daughter

Raynell, conceived in infidelity while he was “moving around from place to place . . . woman to woman . . . searching out the New Land” (49). The song Cory and Raynell sing together in memory of their father’s dog, Blue, is a communal memory and celebration of Troy:

COREY and RAYNELL.

Old Blue died and I dug his grave

I dug his grave with a silver spade

Let him down with a golden chain

And every night I call his name

Go on Blue, you good dog you

RAYNELL.

Blue laid down and died like a man

Blue laid down and died . . .

BOTH.

Blue laid down and died like a man

Now he’s treeing possums in the Promised Land

I’m gonna tell you this to let you know

Blue’s gone where the good dogs go. (92)

Their song, an altered version of the traditional American folk song, is an acknowledgement that he gave them “the best” he had, and that he has finally found his place (91).

As Headley was in Seven Guitars, the “fool” is responsible for “cultural healing as well as cultural reclamation” critical to Wilson’s purpose in the cycle—he cures displacement from the margin (Elam 5). Troy’s brother Gabriel was wounded in World War II, compensated, and subsequently ignored by the government. Troy doubly displaces Gabriel when he takes his brother’s money to use as a down-payment on his house. Even in this double displacement (by the government and by his brother), Gabriel’s money makes him “materially connected to the well-being of his family” (Elam 65). He is unknowingly responsible for Troy’s physical emplacement in his house: “That’s the only way I got a roof over my head . . . cause of that metal plate. . . . If my brother didn’t have that metal plate in his head . . . I wouldn’t have a pot to piss

92 in or a window to throw it out of” (Fences 31). Gabriel is yet another victim of Troy’s ability to displace others, but in an ironic turn Gabriel is responsible for the emplacement of Troy and his family.26

Gabriel appears onstage the first time carrying a ragged basket full of “an assortment of discarded fruits and vegetables he has picked up in the strip district and which he attempts to sell” singing about the price of plums (27-28). The food he attempts to sell is leftover, found in the alley, and marginal—a reminder of Toledo’s rant about leftovers in Ma Rainey. His leftovers don’t meet society’s standard for edible food, having been discarded, and shows his marginal method of emplacing others as well as his own marginality as a “madman”—he doesn’t meet society’s standard of normal, either as a black man or an injured hero-soldier (Elam 58). Like his leftovers he is discarded. He wants to feed the community, to place them, but he is unable to provide a meal. Rather, like Wilson’s other “fools,” he provides a spiritual emplacement that is materially embodied in his marginal fruits and vegetables—his “madness enables” him to

“transfigure discord into harmony” (58). He offers a culinary and spiritual session assembled from the leftovers.

He survives on the barest of rations, however, like a kind of spiritual ascetic. Rose offers him food every time he appears in the yard, but he rarely takes the offered provisions—she worries about him: “He ain’t eating right. Miss Pearl say she can’t get him to eat nothing”

(Fences 30). In his first appearance Rose goes in the house to make biscuits at his request (“I’ll

26 Troy displaces Gabriel one more time in the play when he signs the papers that have Gabriel committed to the hospital and half of his monthly check from the government turned over to Troy: “ROSE: I said send him to the hospital . . . you said let him be free . . . now you done went down there and signed him to the hospital for half his money. You went back on yourself, Troy. You gonna have to answer for that” (71).

93 take some biscuits. You got some biscuits?”), but he doesn’t want them by the time they’re ready

(29):

TROY. Go on in the house there. Rose going to fix you something to eat.

GABRIEL. Oh, I ain’t hungry. I done had breakfast with Aunt Jemimah. She

come by and cooked me up a whole mess of flapjacks. Remember how we used to

eat them flapjacks?

TROY. Go on in the house and get you something to eat now.

GABRIEL. I got to sell my plums. I done sold some tomatoes. Got me two

quarters. Wanna see? . . . I’m gonna save them and buy me a new horn so St.

Peter can hear me when it’s time to open the gates. . . . Hear that? That’s the

hellhounds. I got to chase them out of here. Go on get out of here! Get out!

(GABRIEL exits singing.) (30)

Rather than eating Gabriel has to go about the spiritual business of chasing hellhounds. Elam observes that Gabe’s “alienat[ion] from his social environment . . . posits him in a space of alternative consciousness where he has a special spiritual mission to fulfill. He is beyond the threat of earthly events. Now, he fiercely believes he is the archangel Gabriel and chases hellhounds” (64). In Wilson’s Pittsburgh—where the supernatural is real and inseparable from the natural and where people live to see three hundred—Gabriel’s place of mental marginality allows him to traffic with the spiritual world.

Gabriel’s unique relationship with the spiritual world is fully revealed in the closing moments of the play. Troy is dead and his children attempt to find a place without him and in spite of him. Gabriel arrives with the trumpet—purchased with his discarded fruit and vegetable

94 sales—that will open the gates of heaven for Troy: “It’s time to tell St. Peter to open the gates.

Troy, you ready? You ready, Troy. I’m gonna tell St. Peter to open the gates. You get ready now” (93). Until this point in the play, Gabriel is just a madman who wanders in and out of the yard prophesying of hellhounds, but Troy’s death—the ultimate displacement—is the catalyst for

Gabriel’s act of emplacement. Wilson’s description suggests Gabriel’s disregard for the dichotomy of the spiritual and the material:

GABRIEL, with great fanfare, braces himself to blow. The trumpet is without a

mouthpiece. HE puts the end of it into his mouth and blows with great force, like a

man who has been waiting some twenty-odd years for this single moment. No

sound comes out of the trumpet. HE braces himself and blows again with the

same result. A third time he blows. There is a weight of impossible description

that falls away and leaves him bare and exposed to a frightful realization. It is a

trauma that a sane and normal mind would be unable to withstand. HE begins to

dance. A slow, strange dance, eerie and life-giving. A dance of atavistic signature

and ritual. . . . HE begins to howl in what is an attempt at song, or perhaps a song

turning back into itself in an attempt at speech. HE finishes his dance and the

gates of heaven stand open as wide as God’s closet. (93)

Gabriel’s syncretic ritual finally emplaces Troy as the “gates of heaven stand open as wide as

God’s closet” for him. Only one of Wilson’s madmen could usher a fellow character into his final emplacement with a broken trumpet, an ancestral dance, and a primal howl.

It would be tempting to attenuate the genesis of women who perform acts of domestic place-making: Black Mary, Bertha, Vera, Louise, Rose, and now Risa in Two Trains Running.

But to suggest that these women only play a reductionist, ideal, domestic role in their place- making is to negate their complex narratives: Black Mary’s unknown future; Bertha’s persistently tense relationship with her bad-tempered husband; Vera’s abandonment by Floyd and her haunting and revelatory visions at his funeral; Louise’s continuing care for the difficult

Hedley and her concerns about her niece Ruby; and Rose’s further emplacement after Troy’s overpowering displacement and death. They are faced with present and continuous burdens in their place-making: their immediate circumstances, their histories, their community, and society’s persistent overwhelming disregard. Risa in Two Trains Running, however, is a new kind of woman that provides a place in which displacement is cured—she emplaces from the margin. From her first moment onstage, her own horrific displacement is evident in her body.

Heretofore, the women mentioned represent a central, normative, domestic place in the play- cycle, whereas Wilson’s fool has represented the margin. But in Trains the center shifts, and both

Risa and the play’s fool, Hambone, reside in the margin of the play.

Set in a soon-to-be demolished diner in 1969, Two Trains Running shows the decline of the Hill District neighborhood and the impending gentrification that will ultimately displace those who live and work there. Memphis’ diner is a public meeting-place for a handful of

African American men who come and go, discussing the assassinations of Malcom X and Martin

Luther King Jr., the black power movement, and the fluctuating state of the neighborhood. The play takes place against the backdrop of a rally celebrating Malcom X’s birthday. In the first scene two arrivals signal the conflict and conclusion of the play: Sterling arrives looking for

96 work after serving a prison sentence for a bank robbery, and Hambone, the play’s madman, enters repeating his daily request for the ham he was promised in payment for painting a local butcher’s fence. Sterling is unable to find work so he comes to the diner for community and to woo Risa, Memphis’ only waitress. There he encounters Hambone, whom he tries to teach about the black power movement as the play progresses. Memphis is most concerned about the financial loss he will incur if he is unfairly compensated for his diner as the neighborhood is gentrified. In the second half of the play after Hambone is found dead in his apartment, those who frequent the diner come together to bury him with dignity. In the final scene of the play,

Memphis comes back from court having received a generous sum of money for his diner. He celebrates by purchasing flowers for Hambone’s casket. In the final moment, Sterling runs in bleeding—he has stolen a ham from the butcher’s shop across the street for Hambone.

Trains contains the play-cycle’s most haunting character description. Risa, the lone waitress in Memphis’ diner, is briefly described in her first appearance onstage: “RISA is a young woman who, in an attempt to define herself in terms other than her genitalia, has scarred her legs with a razor” (3). The image is of a woman who has received repeated displacing blows from men and from herself in order to survive. Unlike the other women in the play-cycle who control their domestic place with often good-natured banter, Risa (who is most like Rose) is broken and powerless in this male-dominated world. Her boss, Memphis, constantly berates her:

MEMPHIS. Risa get on back there and get that chicken ready, you ain’t got time

to be standing around. (RISA exits into the back.) . . . Hey, Risa. (RISA enters

from the back.)

RISA. What?

MEMPHIS. What you mean, “What?”? You see the man sitting there. Wait on

him. That’s what you here for.

RISA. I was trying to clean the chicken.

MEMPHIS. That man want to eat now. He ain’t thinking about you cleaning no

chicken.

RISA. We ain’t got no chicken. And we ain’t got no meat loaf. We ain’t got no

hamburger either. We just got beans and corn bread.

MEMPHIS. You got some hamburger back there.

RISA. It’s all frozen. (15-16)

Memphis does not provide ample ingredients for her to cook or serve food—he wants her to be powerless. He displaces her and hinders her from emplacing others. Instead, she fights for a way to resist and emplace from the margin, beginning with her relationship with Hambone, the play’s fool.

Nine-and-a-half years prior to the play’s opening, Hambone painted a fence for Lutz, the white butcher whose business sits across the street from the diner. Lutz promised a ham in payment, but gave Hambone a chicken instead. He has never forgotten, and his mind, already fragile, “has deteriorated to such a point that he can only say two phrases, and he repeats them idiotically over and over” (14). Hambone’s insistent repetition of his wants irritates Memphis, who repeatedly kicks him out of the diner. But Risa resists:

HAMBONE. He gonna give me my ham. He gonna give me my ham.

MEMPHIS. Naw. Naw. Take that on out of here. Risa, don’t give him nothing.

Go on, take that somewhere else.

HAMBONE. He gonna give me my ham. He gonna give me my ham.

MEMPHIS. I don’t wanna here that today. Go on out of here with that.

RISA. Here’s your coffee, Hambone.

MEMPHIS. I told you not to give him nothing.

RISA. He ain’t bothering nobody.

MEMPHIS. Let him take that somewhere else. (MEMPHIS comes around the

counter, takes the coffee from HAMBONE, and throws it out.)

RISA. He ain’t bothering nobody, Memphis. He just come in to get his coffee.

HAMBONE (to MEMPHIS): He gonna give me my ham.

MEMPHIS (pushing HAMBONE toward the door): Go on over there and get it.

HAMBONE. I want my ham!

MEMPHIS (at the door): There he is. Go on over there. (HAMBONE exits.)

Come in here running off at the mouth. I’m tired of hearing that.

RISA. He don’t bother nobody. (43-44)

She resists by feeding Hambone against Memphis’ wishes—her resistance empowers her to emplace the displaced. Like Hambone, she eventually provides a place for the impulsive and rootless Sterling by offering him food even when he can’t pay.

Hambone himself is displaced—like Gabriel his living situation is only guessed at throughout the play—but in spite of (or because of) his madness he emplaces other characters.

Hollaway’s observation that “he might have more sense than any of us” suggests the deeper communal purpose Hambone serves. Holloway explains Hambone’s role further:

Now you take me or you. We ain’t gonna do that. We gonna go ahead and forget

about it. We might take a chicken. Then we gonna go home and cook that

chicken. But how it gonna taste? It can’t taste good to us. We gonna be eating just

to be eating. How we gonna feel good about ourselves? Every time we even look

at a chicken we gonna have a bad taste in our mouth. That chicken’s gonna call up

that taste. It’s gonna make you feel ashamed. . . . That’s why I say he might have

more sense than me and you. Cause he ain’t willing to accept whatever the white

man throw at him. It be easier. But he say he don’t mind getting out of bed in the

morning to go at what’s right. I don’t believe you and me got that much sense.

(29-30)

Holloway’s monologue reveals that Hambone’s madness is regenerative to this community—it teaches them to struggle for a place. Elam observes that, “Lost on the other characters until after his death is how Hambone’s personal struggle against injustice reflects their own need for persistent, collective, revolutionary action” (66). At the end of the play when a drunken

Memphis learns Hambone is dead, he stops “in pain, wounded by all the cruel and cold ironies of life,” but quickly rallies and promises to build a new diner with “everything on the menu.

Short ribs. Bar-B-Que . . . I might have me a little takeout on the side”—Hambone’s death helps him persist in building a place from which to resist (110).

Hambone and Risa share a unique bond that suggests both their own displacement (at the hands of abusers) and their impetus to emplace others despite their displacement. The self- inflicted scars that cover Risa’s legs are also etched onto Hambone’s body. Mr. West, the undertaker, discovers them after Hambone’s death: “Man had so many scars on his body . . . I

100 ain’t never seen nothing like that. All on his back, his chest . . . his legs” (91). Like Risa,

Hambone’s body tells the story of marginalization. In the final moment of the play, Sterling runs in with wounds on his face and hands that suggest his solidarity with Risa and Hambone. He has stolen a ham for Hambone and proudly exhibits the cuts he’s received: “That’s for Hambone’s casket” (110). He assumes Hambone’s role as emplacer.

The playwright’s impulse toward the associative and repetitive in the way he conceived of the Pittsburgh Cycle (like a growing collage) can be seen in its overall program, but it is also evident in the individual plays. Joan Fishman observes that Wilson “take[s] ordinary people and endow[s] their everyday activities—bathing, train watching or guitar playing—with ritualistic significance . . . connecting the physical and spiritual worlds” (142).27 One might also add eating to Fishman’s list of repetitive, banal activities that blossom into a ritual: “Reenactments of real life events—for example, scenes of cooking and eating—weave through Wilson’s work” (136).

This collage-like use of eating and discussion of food is conspicuous in the first play Wilson wrote, Jitney. The ritual of repetition helps create a place when the locale itself is in jeopardy.

As the title suggests, the play is set in a “gypsy cab station” in Pittsburgh 1977—a thoroughfare for people coming and going (Jitney 11). Becker runs the rogue jitney station for those that can’t afford a taxi—he serves the margins of society. Just like Memphis’ diner in Two

Trains Running, gentrification threatens the future of the jitney station. The play primarily deals

27 Fishman’s essay, “Romare Bearden, August Wilson, and the Traditions of African Performance” addresses the influence Bearden had over Wilson’s work. Although the two never met, Bearden had a profound affect on Wilson’s plays; Fishman identifies a conspicuous aesthetic similarity between the two artists—that of the collage. Several of Wilson’s titles are directly culled from Bearden’s collages: The Piano Lesson and The Train as two obvious examples. Most importantly Fishman identifies a coinciding theme in both men’s work: “Images of community and themes of community life are central to both Wilson’s and Bearden’s work. And at the heart of the community, for Wilson and Bearden, are women” (141). Although women do not primarily populate Wilson’s plays, they are the place-making center of the plays along with the madmen.

101 with the relationships of Youngblood (a Vietnam veteran in his mid-twenties) and his girlfriend

Rena, and Becker and his son Booster who has just been released from prison for killing his white girlfriend after she falsely accused him of raping her. Youngblood and Rena’s conflict is over his plan to purchase a home without her knowledge and the work he secretly takes on in order to finance the home. He is trying to move back into a society that has no need of him after returning from Vietnam. Booster, Becker’s son, has just arrived home after spending twenty years in prison. He and his father argue: Booster accuses his father of not fighting for his ideals, while Becker blames his wife’s death on his son. Becker tells his son he never wants to see him again. The next day Becker makes plans to return to the steel mill where he once worked since he is being forced to close the jitney station, but he is killed in an accident at the mill. Booster returns to the station looking for his father, there the other men inform him of his death. As the play ends, Booster answers the phone to take a fare. He does what his father could not do: he fights for the jitney station.

In his introduction to the play, Marion Isaac McClinton speaks to the place-making effects of Wilson’s play: “He gives us rides to all the places we need to get to, return trip included at no extra fee. He will not leave you someplace without a way back home, and he will make sure you have more coming back than what you left with” (8).28 The station itself has a collage-like influence on the characters because of its position as a place, not of linear movement, but as a central place from which one receives a ride in any direction—the places stack up like a collage, “disparate elements . . . brought together to form a whole” (Fishman

28 McClinton was Jitney’s director for its New York premiere at the Second Stage Theatre in April 2000.

102

138). The central station (like the diner in Trains), however, is in jeopardy of losing its status as a place because of the changing shape of the neighborhood:

They’re tearing everything down around here. All along Wylie there. You see

they done tore everything down. They gonna tear this building down. They gonna

board it up first of the month. We’re gonna have to move. Either that or split up.

We can’t stay here no more. (Jitney 51)

While the whole play is set in one locale that ought to provide a stable place, the place itself is called into question because the place itself is the question—will the jitney station be able to continue as a place where community is created? Since that question is not resolved until the end of the play—or at least temporarily resolved when Booster (the dead owner’s son) answers the phone to schedule a ride in defiance of their eviction—the characters’ bodies and their collage- like discussion of food helps establish a place.

Early in the play, Darnell Youngblood expresses a sentiment that establishes his tense search for a place: “I ain’t gonna mess up my car hauling people’s groceries around” (14). While

Youngblood’s persistent concern is for his car (he doesn’t want to carry luggage either) the issue of food comes up repeatedly in his relationships. Wilson seems to include the repeated reference to food in Youngblood’s dialogue as a way of establishing a ritual of the commonplace—eating, drinking, buying groceries, and talking about eating are the repeated stuff of a common life and of being in place. Youngblood’s argument with Turnbo (a fellow jitney driver) about coffee repeats throughout the play:

YOUGBLOOD. Turnbo, give me my thirty cents.

TURNBO. What thirty cents you talking about?

103

YOUNGBLOOD. For the coffee. You know what I’m talking about. (TURNBO

motions to the coffee on the stove.)

TURNBO. There it is. I ain’t touched it. That’s your coffee.

YOUNGBLOOD. I know you better give me my thirty cents. (27)

The implication here (and in Youngblood’s previous rejection of a fare because he doesn’t want to haul groceries) is that Youngblood doesn’t want to provide for anyone’s bodily needs—he doesn’t want to create a place. This is reiterated in a conversation with his wife Rena about the grocery money:

RENA. I’m working my little job down there at the restaurant . . . going to school

. . . trying to take care of Jesse . . . trying to take care of your needs . . . trying to

keep the house together . . . trying to make everything better. Now, I come home

from work I got to go to the store. I go upstairs and look in the drawer and the

food money is gone. Now you explain that to me. There was eighty dollars in the

drawer that ain’t in there now.

YOUNGBLOOD. I needed it. I’m gonna put it back.

RENA. What you need it for? You tell me. What’s more important than me and

Jesse eating?

YOUNGBLOOD. I had to pay a debt. I’m gonna put it back.

RENA. You know I don’t touch the grocery money. Whatever happens we got to

eat. If I need clothes . . . I do without. My little personal stuff . . . I do without. If I

ain’t got no electricity . . . I do without . . . but I don’t never touch the grocery

money. Cause I’m not gonna be that irresponsible to my child. (33)

104

It seems Youngblood is using the grocery money on himself—his friends accuse him of having an affair with Rena’s sister: “Everybody know how you misuse that gal, keeping her tied up in the house with that baby while you run around with her sister and don’t give her two pennies to buy the baby no milk” (42). Is Youngblood displacing Rena by stealing her grocery money?

While this is implied as the play progresses—Youngblood refuses to set the record straight when accused of neglecting his family—the truth is that Youngblood works a second job and borrows from the grocery money to purchase a house. While Rena is pleased, she’s frustrated that

Youngblood worked to make a place in isolation: “I’m not asking you to do it by yourself. I’m here with you. We in this together. See . . . house or no house we still ain’t got the food money. .

. . you did the right thing but you did it all wrong” (75). Rena wants Youngblood to find a place through their shared community, not just buy her a house. She reminds him that their place is not a house, but the shared session of communion necessary to make a place.

Like the questions about Youngblood’s intention to displace or place Rena, there are questions about the jitney station itself—is it a place itself or just a thoroughfare for place- making? Booster’s final decision to serve the margins of the community through the gypsy cab company despite their impending displacement (precipitated by his father Becker’s untimely death in an industrial accident) establishes the location as an important place in the community.

McClinton’s observations about Wilson’s place-making in his play-cycle mirrors Booster’s choice to make a place despite the opposition:

These stories . . . say “This here is our place” a place that is inherited, just like our

blood and bones, a place where stories live that help to define who we have been

who we are, so we might wonder at the possibilities of who we can be. This is our

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place to stand upon, so that we can snatch the future and claim it forever, never to

lose it again. (8)

The jitney station, like the characters’ bodies that come and go through it, is the location of a collage-like, pieced-together narrative that establishes it as an important place through which this community connects.

Wilson does something entirely new in the play-cycle’s penultimate play King Hedley

II—he returns to the previous locale and a partial set of characters from Seven Guitars. Both

Ruby and Canewell appear in the ninth play; however, Stool Pigeon (the Hedley character) doesn’t reveal himself as Canewell (the Guitars character) until the second scene of the play. He eventually tells the story of how he got his new name: “After Floyd was killed Hedley showed me the money. Told me Buddy Bolden gave it to him. That’s when I knew. I say, ‘I got to tell.’

What else could I do? Ruby called me ‘Stool Pigeon’ and somehow or another it stuck. I’ll tell anybody I’m a Truth Sayer” (62). The harmonica-playing jazz musician from Guitars becomes the madman truth-teller of Hedley.

Set in the backyard of Ruby, King, Tonya, and Stool Pigeon’s deteriorating houses,

Hedley takes place in 1985 during the trickle-down economics of the Reagan administration. The promised wealth has not arrived in this neighborhood. King, the supposed son of Hedley and

Ruby in Seven Guitars, and his friend Mister are trying to make a living selling stolen refrigerators. King’s wife, Tonya, finds out she’s pregnant. She wants to have an abortion because she sees the violence done to African American men in her community and she refuses to watch another child die. In another symbol of decline, Stool Pigeon announces the death of

Aunt Ester at the age of three-hundred-sixty-six—“She ain’t seen nothing but grief” (21). Stool

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Pigeon observes all these events, prophesying that “God got a plan” while he looks for the sacrifice that will bring Aunt Ester and her dead cat back to life (21). King obsessively tends the seeds he plants in the yard, trying to create life in the most hostile of circumstances. Instead, he is shot in the throat at the end of the play in a craps game gone wrong. Stool Pigeon gets the sacrifice he believes will resurrect the community.

Like the madmen before him, Stool Pigeon attempts to place the displaced from his marginal location. Wilson’s description of the locale immediately establishes not only Stool

Pigeon’s marginal position, but also the increasingly marginal position of this neighborhood—he inhabits the margins of the margin itself. A central vacant lot sits where a house once stood, and a faded advertisement for Alaga Syrup (“The Sweetness of the South”) featuring baseball legend

Willie Mays can be seen through the vacant lot—visions of what Troy in Fences might have been. Elam identifies the setting of Hedley as one of “apocalyptic” displacement:

The characters live in the shell of former buildings. The backdrop reveals the

crumbling brick and worn-out remains of tenements. The lively backyard of some

forty years earlier in Seven Guitars is now in a state of fragmented ruin. This

“postmodern” apocalyptic set symbolizes the conditions Wilson perceives as

endemic in black America during the 1980s, a community destroyed by

systematic abandonment, internalized oppression, self-destructive violence, and in

need of spiritual and social regeneration. (69)

Wilson will not return to this community or even an outdoor setting in his final play—this play marks the end of this neighborhood, this place, this family, and the violence that affects them.

Regeneration has to be found elsewhere. Stool Pigeon, the most marginal of Wilson’s madmen,

107 is the witness to the beginning of this place as well as its end. His habit of hoarding newspapers positions him as the heir of memories once kept by the now deceased Aunt Ester.

Another defining characteristic of this play is the nature of its Prologue. While Wilson begins Gem of the Ocean with a brief three-character scene he calls a Prologue, Hedley’s

Prologue is a monologue directed at the audience. Stool Pigeon draws the audience intimately into the action—one can’t help but think of Hedley’s attention-grabbing violent beheading of a rooster in Guitars. Not only does the Prologue lay the foundation for a shared space between the character and the audience, but also it establishes his role as place-maker and witness: this is his narrative; he defines the parameters. Stool Pigeon enters beating two ham bones together to call stray dogs for dinner. The beginning of his speech, however, is addressed to the alley cats instead of the audience: “You stay out of the way of them dogs now. They gonna come for these bones. .

. . I’m gonna get you some fish heads tomorrow” (7). Like Wilson’s other madmen, Stool Pigeon makes a place from the margin, but more importantly, he makes a place for the most marginal— the stray animals. There is a metaphorical connection between the food he provides for the unwanted animals and place:

Stool Pigeon repeatedly removes the covers of trash cans so that the neighborhood

dogs can eat from them. Symbolically, this act opens up to those without access

the spoils of the garbage cans. Using the metaphor of food, Stool Pigeon’s

benevolence reveals the hierarchies present in the rules of our social order as he

provides the “underdog” with sustenance. (Elam 70)

While Stool Pigeon provides a place for the underdog through the leftovers he forages, he never offers food to any human in the play, nor does he discuss food with another person—only the

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“leftover” animals. Has he decided this place is a dead end? Are the human bodies that inhabit it not worth emplacing?

In the Preface to Hedley, Wilson says his ancestors “existed as an appendage to the body of society”—is Stool Pigeon affirming the marginalization of the African American body by denying his community an emplacing session (ix)? Or does the madman know that emplacement will take something more than food for this community in a soon-to-be gentrified Hill District?

Stool Pigeon seems to be waiting for something more.

Act One closes with King defending the virility of the soil in his yard: “Look! Look! This is good dirt! It’s good dirt! Everybody better back the fuck up off me!” (58). King defends the placiness of this place—he believes it is still fertile for community. His wife Tonya wants to abort their child, but King wants her to keep it because he adamantly refuses to believe this place is incapable of producing a community. Just on the heels of King’s vigorous defense of his soil,

Act Two begins with Stool Pigeon burying Aunt Ester’s cat in this same soil. He believes the cat will resurrect if blood is sprinkled on the grave, but not just any blood:

You sprinkle some blood on there and she coming back in seven days if she ain’t

used up her nine lives. I was gonna put some pigeon blood on there but that ain’t

gonna work. God want your best. If I knew where to get a goat I’d kill him and

spill his blood on there. That might work. Either that or a fatted calf. (60)

The sacrifice must be “your best,” just like the traditional narrative of the Old Testament God’s requirement of the best fatted calf as a sacrifice for the sins of the people. Stool Pigeon sprinkles the cat’s grave with a variety of common objects in an attempt to bring the cat back: peanuts and the ashes of his burned newspapers kept in memory of murdered African American men and

109 women (“This my papers. What’s left of them. What them kids gonna do now? They burned up their history. They ain’t gonna know what happened.”) (69). When King is accidently shot in the throat by his mother at the end of the play (again, like the rooster and Floyd in Guitars), his blood is spilled on the cat’s grave: “There is blood on the cat’s grave! [Stool Pigeon] is joyous!”

(102). Finally, Stool Pigeon has the best. He closes the play with a celebration song:

The Alpha and Omega!

You a bad motherfucker!

Say I want your best!

The fatted calf! Not the lean calf.

The fatted calf! (103)

Ironically, King dies on the ground he defends as a fertile place, making this place the most embodied of places delimited by the blood of the very best. Like the Middle Passage—a vast, forgotten, unmarked grave—this ruined back yard becomes a place of memory sprinkled with the blood and ashes of the forgotten and displaced. Stool Pigeon’s strange song of celebration and lament contradicts his seeming disregard for his neighbors’ placement. Aunt Ester’s black cat, and possibly Aunt Ester, can be resurrected because of King’s blood. A simultaneous horror and joy marks this yard as one of the most important places in the play-cycle—Wilson reminds us that being in place often requires painful memories of the violence inflicted upon the bodies of the marginal.

Barbara Kingsolver says, “a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them” (Animal 20). The final play of the play-cycle, Radio Golf, tells a narrative of the displacement of the Hill District community by disassociating the people from the place-

110 making effects of their genuine food culture. Set in 1997, the play shows how the affinity between land and people in jeopardy. Radio Golf is about a plan to tear down the remains of the

Hill District and bring in corporate and industrial food providers, Whole Foods and Starbucks.

Harmond Wilks and Roosevelt Hicks—middle-class, African American businessmen—attempt to displace the fragmented remains of a community whose history has been delimited by the life and death of Aunt Ester. The play’s central conflict is over the house at 1839 Wylie Avenue where Aunt Ester lived. The owner, Old Joe, is unwilling to sell it to the men, eventually starting a protest to save the house. Harmond and Roosevelt are up-and-coming Pittsburgh businessmen.

Harmond is poised to announce his candidacy for mayor and Roosevelt has been made the vice president of a bank. When Harmond discovers the house has been taken illegally from Old Joe, a conflict arises between him and his business partner—Roosevelt doesn’t care about the exploitation of Old Joe. The climax of the play occurs when Roosevelt announces that a judge has thrown out Harmond’s injunction to stop the demolition. Roosevelt tells Harmond he is going to buy out his half of the real-estate company, but Harmond fights back. As Roosevelt leaves the office—triumphant in his resolve to tear down the house—Harmond prepares to join the protestors at 1839 Wylie Avenue.

Old Joe, the play-cycle’s final fool and son of Black Mary (Gem), is reminded of the importance of lost food culture by the memories of his mother’s bread pudding and Miss

Harriet’s “fried chicken place around the corner” (Golf 43). He rehearses his memory of a lost culture defined by the community who lived there and those that went mad with the effects of displacement:

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Sam Green was a black man used to own a grocery store down on Fullerton

Street. Green’s Groceries. That was the biggest grocery store down there. Used to

sell live chickens and have the vegetables sitting out on the sidewalk. Everybody

used to shop at Green’s Groceries. He went out to Shadyside to buy some

furniture and the police arrested him. Say he look suspicious. He can’t look no

other way than the way he look. He found out he living with people who look at

him with suspicion. Wherever he go and whatever he do. He found that out and

that sent him straight to the hospital. Had to haul him away in a straitjacket. . . .

He might be dead ‘cause living like that is hard on your body. (57)

Old Joe knows that displacement and suspicion affect the body—not just businesses and food.

But Hicks is “looking to eat [his] breakfast in a brand-new place” that encourages systemic cultural amnesia (46). Without a doubt, Old Joe is part of Wilson’s line of oracular madmen. But

Wilson no longer reserves one character as the madman. By this point in the play-cycle all the emplaced characters are mad: Sam Green (the grocer), Sterling Johnson (who appears thirty years after Trains), Old Joe, and by the end of the play, Harmond Wilks. Sterling reappears in

Golf as a handyman looking for work after being released from prison for bank robbery. His role in Trains was to assist Hambone in his struggle against Lutz—to affect place-making even after

Hambone’s death. At the end of Trains, Sterling is the one who runs in, bleeding, ham in hand:

“That’s for Hambone’s casket” (110). In Golf he participates in the emplacement of the community in a similar way by assisting Old Joe in his struggle against the invasion of amnesia through displacement. Whereas in Trains he seems naively sure of himself, by Golf he is certain about what 1839 Wylie Avenue and the Hill District mean to this community’s emplacement

112 because he has become fully and deeply embodied. He puts Roosevelt in his place by reminding him of his own deep emplacement:

What? You think I’m a stray dog? I’m homeless? I ain’t got no friends? I ain’t got

no purpose in life? You the big man. You got everything. You got more reason to

live than I do. What you got I ain’t got? I got good manners and everything. What

you got? What makes you special? I got a house. I got everything you got. Plus a

little bit more. I got common sense. I know riddles. I can sing. And I used to have

a pretty good hoop game. What you got I ain’t got? I got a dick. I got a fist. I got a

gun. I got a knife. What you got? (76)

Roosevelt responds: “I got some money” (76). Sterling is not impressed: “Money make you special?” (76). The madman Sterling has the cultural stuff, the memories, and the embodiment that makes him fully emplaced. Before he leaves the stage for the last time, he marks his body with paint to symbolically declare war on Roosevelt and his intended destruction of the Hill:

“See that? I learned that from Cohise. We on the battlefield now” (77). The notes at the end of the play reveal that the Broadway production ended with Harmond mirroring Sterling’s madness:

“Harmond painted warrior markings on his face, similar to Sterling’s actions, then exited the office, paintbrush in hand” (81). Harmond decides that defending the community’s memories that exist in the bodies and built environment of the Hill is the only way to keep from displacing the people—even if the attempt isn’t successful. Old Joe’s seemingly tangential narratives of chicken, bread pudding, and grocery stores are important catalysts of memory that reveal the community’s connection to this place.

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Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle is not only held together as a play-cycle by its length, characters, and themes, but also by its intimate concern with place. While this concern with place seems evident—nine of the ten plays are set in the same neighborhood—the unification of location (while critical to the study of place in the theatre) is simply a formal representation of the play-cycle’s structure. Deeper within this narrative, however, is the ritual and repetition of culinary culture that uniquely identifies the community and establishes them in place. John Lahr, in his introduction to Gem, reminds us that Wilson’s “social history . . . teaches through joy, not reason” (ix). Wilson repeatedly allows his characters to joyfully engage with their culinary culture in order to remind them and the audience of African American cultural history (ix). He does this through the insistence of a cultural memory that conjures up Africa, the Middle

Passage, the agrarian South, and the streets of the industrial North:

The culture of black America, forged in the cotton fields of the South and tested

by the hard pavements of the industrial North, has been the ladder by which we

have climbed into the New World. The field of manners and rituals of social

intercourse—the music, speech, rhythms, eating habits, religious beliefs, gestures,

notions of common sense, attitudes toward sex, concepts of beauty and justice,

and the responses to pleasure and pain—have enabled us to survive the loss of our

political will and the disruption of our history. The culture’s moral codes and

sanction of conduct offer clear instructions as to the value of community, and

make clear that the preservation and promotion, the propagation and rehearsal of

the value of one’s ancestors is the surest way to a full and productive life.

(Wilson, Introduction Hedley II viii)

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Wilson does not weave the narrative of a community spinning about in an unlimited space, but of a specific place delimited by the people who are intimately connected to their culinary culture—a culinary culture that is a performance of their history and a means to overcome generations of displacement. Wilson’s characters have a dream of returning to a place that is embodied in their culinary choices—a land that is lost to them; a land (both in the South and in Africa) that holds empty promises of identity and place. But the food they consume is an immediate and attainable conduit for their return—a conduit of memory. In the Pittsburgh Cycle eating makes place because eating is an embodiment of history. It is a means by which the characters overcome displacement and become emplaced in their bodies and their community.

CHAPTER 3

LOCALIZED CARING IN HORTON FOOTE’S THE ORPHANS’ HOME CYCLE

It is the truly ordinary who need a voice, those whose lives demonstrate that if it is possible, it is not easy to live decently, that our hazy vision of the past, of a time when everything was simple, is hopelessly blurred. Someone must sing of the seemingly unheroic who never made much money or acquired what could in any way be construed as fame, but who somehow managed to make a home. Someone must grieve for those who seem too small to be figures in a tragedy, but who in building their lives on the empty slogans of our empty myths find themselves without much money and without much of anything else either. For though our society is—and should be—a seed-ground for the extraordinary, such persons are to grace and benefit the rest of us, not make us irrelevant.

—Marian Burkhart, Horton Foote’s America: A Critical Analysis of His Plays

To be engaged bodily in a built place is already to dwell in that place.

—Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World

In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies . . . . Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being’s first world. Before he is “cast into the world,” as claimed by certain hasty metaphysics, man is laid in the cradle of the house.

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

In the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s 1958 poetics of experienced architecture, he makes a metaphorical connection between the human body and the built environment. In the same way we would be “dispersed” without our bodies, we would also be dispersed without the

“cradle” of a built place in which to dwell (7). The dwelling place that provides our “first universe”—a house of even the most “primitive” sort—is not unlike Edward Casey’s delimiting

115 116 body explored in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle (Bachelard 4). Through our bodies we become emplaced. Bachelard teases out the phenomenology of various intimate locales within the house; by doing so, he moves from the house as an unlimited space to a delimited place:

“Indeed, in our houses we have nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up belongs to the phenomenology of the verb to inhabit, and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity” (xxxviii). A house becomes a place through our intense inhabitation of it. When we “curl up” in a space (whether in the literal or figurative sense), it ceases to be a space-like passageway to facilitate our egress and becomes a place where we intensely pause. Movement stops and place-making begins.

While it may seem like a leap from the sublime and elite elucidation of home in

Bachelard’s work to the arguably simple and common expressions of home in Horton Foote’s

The Orphans’ Home Cycle, the connection between the two suggests the importance and wide- ranging discussion of home (and house) as an elemental place-maker.29 Home, and in turn place, are the subjects of both the academically elite architectural philosopher, as well as the small- town, East Texas, local boy who made good. Marian Burkhart, in her 2009 book Horton Foote’s

America: A Critical Analysis of His Plays, takes aim at Foote’s critics who speak of nostalgia and “the simplistic” in his plays (15). By doing so, she identifies how Foote simultaneously elevates the discussion of home while setting it firmly in the “commonplace”—as James Agee

29 In this chapter I will use the nine-play Grove Press editions that are full-length reprints of the plays. In 2009-10 the Cycle was performed as a trilogy at the New York Signature Theatre Company—each act was a one-act reduction of each of the nine plays. The three sections are titled: The Story of a Childhood, The Story of a Marriage, The Story of a Family. It is not my intention to address the amended version of the Cycle except by acknowledging its reception to critical acclaim (it won the award for the New York Critics’ Circle best play), and suggesting, along with Marian Burkhart, that it is an “extraordinary introduction to an extraordinary American drama” (135).

117 and Walker Evans do in their Depression-era document of three tenant-farmer families in

Alabama, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (23). Like Agee and Evans, Foote makes a place for the “unheroic” and voiceless “who somehow managed to make a home” against a backdrop “of disorder that approaches the chaotic” (Burkhart 15, 12). Victor Hugo’s sublime and grotesque meet in Foote’s play-cycle where, despite the violence, chaos, displacement, and inequality that is the reality of the common American experience, ordinary people attempt to make a place by creating a home (16).30

In The Orphans’ Home Cycle, Horton Foote tells the narrative of characters who seek a cure to their ongoing physical and spiritual displacement through their negotiation of the built environment. Although Foote uses these built structures to facilitate both physical and spiritual emplacement, simply acquiring a house does not assure identity-affirming emplacement. Rather, characters are required to cultivate a built environment, not only inhabit it. Because of the extended form of the play-cycle, a character’s cultivation of a built environment forces him or her to confront the violence and chaos of a community. But Foote doesn’t locate final stable emplacement in the inhabitation of a house; instead he demonstrates emplacement in flux— characters often caught between certainty and uncertainty.

Marion Castleberry calls Horton Foote’s The Orphans’ Home Cycle “an evocative and imaginative record of a place and time” in his Introduction to Foote’s anthologized lectures,

Genesis of an American Playwright (2004) (11). Reynolds Price similarly praises

30 Victor Hugo proposes combining the sublime and grotesque in his preface to his wildly unpopular play, Cromwell (1827). The characteristically wordy text is often identified as his manifesto of Romanticism. It is his reaction to the neoclassical formulas that were prevalent in the French theatre.

118 the Cycle in his introductory essay to the 1986 Grove Press edition of the play-cycle’s three central plays:

I’m confident it will take its rightful earned place near the center of our largest

American dramatic achievements—a slowly generated, slowly won, apparently

effortless, surprisingly wide vision of human life that flowers before our patient

incredulous eyes with an opulent richness of fully communicated pleasure,

comprehension, and usable knowledge: a permanent gift. (xiii)

Foote’s play-cycle was written over a three-year period (1974-77) after his parents’ deaths— whose relationship is the subject of the Cycle. He had already established himself as an important

American playwright with his plays Wharton Dance (1939), Texas Town (1941), The Traveling

Lady (1954), and (most notably) The Trip to Bountiful (1953), among others; as well as his

Oscar-winning screenplay, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), his primitive and raw screenplay for

William Faulkner’s short story Tomorrow (1972), and his 1983 original screenplay, Tender

Mercies, all featuring Robert Duvall. Foote wrote the play-cycle while feeling disconnected from the American theatre—during a time, he observed, flooded with playwrights who “had [no] particular style of their own, no sense of place” (Genesis 70). Gerald C. Wood suggests that the

American theatre of the sixties and seventies “was disinterested in plays like [Foote’s],” and that

“iconoclastic theater of explosive rhetoric and simple cartoonish surfaces” better suited theatre audiences during the period of unrest (One-Act xvi). During a period away from the theatre in the mid-fifties, Foote admitted his own unrest and need for a “steady goal” instead of the

“improvised one” that defined his acting and writing career—“it was time to be quiet, to assimilate, and to make sense of what I had learned” (Genesis 58). He was trying to find his way

119 forward in the American theatre: “Why did I have no desire to write topical plays about the many social issues of the day? Why was I uninterested in finding a formula for a successful, well-made

Broadway play? Why was I now tired of constantly searching for new theatrical forms?” (58).

After an unsuccessful and disappointing venture writing commissioned work for a Hollywood studio, Foote retreated to his New Hampshire home where he would eventually find his way back into the American theatre by sketching the narrative of his parents’ lives in Wharton, Texas

(the location of all his plays, which he renamed Harrison, Texas). During the winter of 1974—“a time of fuel shortages and exorbitantly high fuel prices”—as Foote was reliving his parents’ stories through their letters and photographs, the playwright wrote 1918 (117). It would eventually become the seventh play in the Cycle.

Foote’s Cycle antedates the first play Wilson wrote in the Pittsburgh Cycle, Jitney, by only a few years. While Foote’s play-cycle was not directing overshadowed by Wilson’s work,

Foote is often considered a regional writer whose plays don’t have a broader appeal beyond the

South or even Texas. But his success with his 1996 drama The Young Man from Atlanta, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1995, and The Trip to Bountiful are both enough reason to explore the Cycle. Both were successful outside of Texas and the South. In her 1988 article

“Horton Foote’s Many Roads Home,” Marian Burkhart calls Foote “quite probably America’s greatest playwright” after seeing the third play in the Cycle, Lily Dale (110). She supports her praise by affirming how his plays extend beyond regional appeal to express the most “ordinary” aspects of American life:

Because Foote knows so well the people of his own region, he knows well the rest

of America, a fact confirmed by the beautifully appropriate set for Lily Dale.

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Looking down from the balcony, my Indiana husband and I found on the set

pieces of furniture we knew from his western Pennsylvania grandmother’s house

and a table my Iowa stepmother had introduced into our Colorado home. Foote’s

plays generate an atmosphere so widely and intensely American it seems that

even citizens for whom the West begins somewhere around the Hudson River

could find in it something of themselves. To recount this aspect of experiencing

Foote is to stress the ordinariness of the artifacts and the speech he uses, for

Foote’s lifelong meditation upon what it means to be American focuses on the

ordinary. (110)

Burkhart’s accolades certainly contain merit; however, one might easily argue she makes a host of assumptions about what one universally experiences as ordinary. Implicit in her praise is an assumption that everyone in American society, from the center to the margins, has a grandmother that purchased the same furniture—furniture that represents a universal American experience.

Indeed Burkhart suggests the value of Foote’s work is in its universal appeal to the virtues of

American democratic ordinariness, which certainly has some value, but the plays demonstrate their value in the way they capture what is unique about a specific time and place—in Foote’s ouvre, the small town. He is commenting on small-town life in the same way Sherwood

Anderson does in Winesburg, Ohio, however, with far less rancor. In Burkhart’s words he

“demythologizes” the small town, “debunking” the myth of the southern male’s “frontier chivalry” (112). Ultimately, it is his dedication to place (in the same way William Faulkner,

Eudora Welty, and August Wilson are dedicated) that makes his play-cycle valuable to the

American theatre. Foote’s specificity of place, like the theatre’s own dedication to place, doubles

121 the aesthetic effect of the theatre event. Foote reaffirms the power of theatre itself when he affirms the necessity of narratives that don’t universalize a people in place and instead specifies the intricacies of their ordinariness.

Charles S. Watson in The History of Southern Drama (1997) situates Foote’s work following an era in southern drama dominated by the work of Tennessee Williams. He suggests that Williams’ work heralded a new era in southern drama: a focus on the “inner emotions” of the southerner (192). Foote, along with Marsha Norman, Preston Jones, and Romulus Linney, signal a further unfolding of Williams’ program of naturalism in southern drama: a penetrating exploration of the southern past and its affects on the present. Watson calls Foote “the most significant dramatist to follow Tennessee Williams” and praises his “highly developed sense of place” (192). Watson even ferrets out a connection between Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and

Foote’s 1982 one-act, “Blind Date”—a comedy about an awkward teenage girl and an even more awkward gentleman caller under the watchful eye of a tarnished southern belle. For Foote, an exploration of the southern past is essential for an understanding of the southern present.

Although a modern playwright, he uncharacteristically rejects a “discontinuity with the past” along with playwrights J. M. Synge, Anton Chekhov, and Eugene O’Neill; like Thornton Wilder and William Faulkner, Foote demonstrates his dissatisfaction with “such aspects of modernity as rootlessness” (198). He is, in Joseph Wood Krutch’s program, an antimodernist, rejecting the notion that there is no way back across the chasm of continuity between the past and the present.

Like Chekhov, to whom he is often compared, “he has not wholly committed himself to the future or willingly surrendered all of the past. He acknowledges . . . a sense of loss, and instead of concerning himself exclusively with what the world is going to become, he looks back,

122 sometimes longingly, towards what it once was” (Krutch 76-77). This “Chekhovian resignation”—the notion that “no clear-cut answer is possible. The thing is both good and bad.

No doubt it had to happen”—runs a through-line in Foote’s plays (76,73). In The Trip to

Bountiful when Carrie Watts hands over her government check to her foolish and selfish daughter-in-law, Jessie Mae (an “archetypal southern woman”), she does so with Chekhovian resignation (Watson 197):

JESSIE MAE. Give it to me before you go and lose it again.

MRS. WATTS. I won’t lose it.

JESSIE MAE. Now don’t start that business again. Just give it to me.

LUDIE. (Interrupting angrily.) Jessie Mae.

JESSIE MAE. Well, I’m not going to—

LUDIE. We’re going to stop this wrangling once and for all. You’ve given me

your word and I expect you to keep your word. We have to live together and

we’re going to live together in peace.

MRS. WATTS. It’s all right, Ludie. (She gives the check to Jessie Mae.) Let

Jessie Mae take care of the check. (Jessie Mae accepts the check. She looks at it

for a moment and then grabs Mrs. Watts’ purse. She opens it and puts the check

inside.)

JESSIE MAE. Oh, here. You keep the check. But don’t go and lose it before you

get home. (She puts the purse back in Mrs. Watts’ hand. She starts offstage.)

Well, come on. Let’s go. (59)

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Ironically, Jessie Mae mirrors Mrs. Watts’ resignation to the way things are when she shoves the embattled check back into her mother-in-law’s purse. Foote’s likeness to Chekhov, Synge,

Williams, and Wilson in his commitment to the specificity of place situates his aesthetic safely within both the American and world theatres.

The play-cycle’s title, The Orphans’ Home Cycle, is taken from Marianne Moore’s anti- war poem “In Distrust of Merits”:

. . . The world’s an orphans’ home. Shall

we never have peace without sorrow?

without pleas of the dying for

help that won’t come? O

quiet form upon the dust, I cannot

look and yet I must. If these great patient

dyings-all these agonies

and wound bearings and bloodshed—

can teach us how to live, these

dyings were not wasted. (137-38)

Foote, like Moore, sets his story of an orphan seeking a cure for his displacement from home against a backdrop of violence.31 Moore’s dead soldiers, all the lost men who would never return

31 While not of central importance to this discussion, it would be inappropriate to overlook Foote’s use of the plural possessive Orphans’ in the title. Moore uses the plural as well in her poem, so its origin seems obvious. On the surface, however, the Cycle isn’t about a number of orphans (like the poem), but about Horace. Foote describes the source of the plays in the Introduction to the first four plays: “Stories . . . of dislocation, sibling rivalries, elopements, family estrangements, family reconciliations, and all the minutiae that make family life at once so interesting and yet at times so burdening” (xiii). Although the Cycle is focused primarily on Horace’s displacement, Foote seems to be making a broader point about societal displacement—that family life anywhere is

124 to their children and never have children, seem to be too great a loss even if peace might be in the exchange. One hopes the displacement of so many will not be in vain.

Foote seems to be asking the same question about his own family (his inspiration for the

Cycle) in the story of Horace’s abandonment by his mother and death of his father—will we never have peace without sorrow? Can Horace create a place, a home, without the displacing effects of sorrow and loss? Foote’s childhood memories suggest those effects are necessary to create a place: “I was spared nothing; I was never told to leave the room no matter how gruesome or unhappy the tale. And so early on, I learned to accept the most tragic events as part of life” (Genesis 19). Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque, so integral to the southern writer’s experience, is an appropriate way to define Foote’s experience and resulting plays: He “has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe everyday, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life” (“Grotesque” 815). This kind of southern grotesque is impossible, in O’Connor’s estimation, without a connection to one’s place.32

Because only by knowing one’s place can one know its true violence.

Foote’s reputation as a writer of place is well documented in both his writing, as well as in nearly every book about his work on stage and screen. In his 1987 lecture “On Being a

Southern Writer,” Foote insists: “My goal is always to establish a true sense of place in my

marked by displacement. We are all, as Moore says, living in a world of orphans. Specifically, Foote seems to be dealing with displacement in the South: “A time of far-reaching social and economic change in Texas. The aftermath of Reconstruction and its passions had brought about a white man’s union to prevent blacks from voting in local and state elections. But in spite of political and social acts to hold onto the past, a way of life was over, and the practical, the pragmatic were scrambling to form a new economic order” (Introduction xii). 32 As O’Connor says in her essay “The Fiction Writer and His Country”: “To know oneself is to know one’s region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world. The writer’s value is lost, both to himself and to his country, as soon as he ceases to see that country as part of himself, and to know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around” (806).

125 work” (Genesis 69). His literary predecessors are the playwrights of the Irish Literary

Renaissance: John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce. In them he found writers of place who were not “content with quaintness and parochialism,” but discovered

“universal myths and truths that transcend all local barriers” in their region (69). In the narrative of his genesis as a southern writer, he acknowledges the influences of the Nashville Agrarians,

Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Stark Young, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams on finding his way as a writer of place. Laurin Porter, in her seminal work on Foote’s play-cycle,

Orphans’ Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote (2003), argues that “a sense of the local” is essential to southern literature; without the subject of place, a work of literature “ceases to qualify as Southern” (190). The southern writer has no identity without place (191). For Porter, however, place in Foote’s work should not be interpreted literally. It is not found in the literal body or built environment, but is “an amalgam of community and family . . . a geography of the heart” (22). Foote’s characters do not find their place and identity exclusively in the four walls that make up a built structure; their physical, built place becomes integral to their spiritual emplacement in the midst of chaos. He tells stories tightly bound to built places. Foote himself acknowledges that built places are essential to his writing: “If you want to recall an emotion from the past, instead of fixing on the emotion you try to remember specific things, like the odor of the room at the time or the color of the wall-paper. Those kinds of things invite emotion” (quoted in

Freedman, Introduction xxi). Clearly, he draws upon his actor training as his way into writing a play. The physical structure of a room is his emotional catalyst. Foote’s memoirs contain detailed passages in which he describes elements of his childhood home, his grandparents’ house, and various apartments and boarding rooms he lived in while studying acting in California and New

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York. These places form his identity many years later. At the end of a lecture on the Cycle given at Texas A&M University in 1993, he connects the built structure, his family’s narrative, and his own act of writing:

I am writing this in the house that I was brought to soon after I was born, the

house, a peace offering, from my grandparents to my parents. The house I grew

up in; the house in which I heard many of these stories of the past and of the

people long dead before I was born. My real grandfather and grandmother’s house

(the Henry Vaughn’s of the cycle) is still there, our backyards meeting. The pecan

trees I climbed as a boy are still yielding their pecans every year. (Genesis 135)

The house itself provides place and identity, acting as a catalyst for his plays and all his writing.

Gerald C. Wood’s observation that “houses represent aspects of the self” in Foote’s plays, suggests he uses built places—both literally and figuratively—to cure his characters’ displacement in his Cycle (Intimacy 13).

What are the place-making effects of the built environment that Foote uses to cure the displacement of his characters and society? Bachelard’s conceit of identifying a house as the human’s first place is further developed in Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Casey’s discussions of the built environment and place.33 In Tuan’s discussion of the built environment in Space and Place, he differentiates between how a colony of termites builds their complex towers and interior farms and how a tribe of humans built their primitive “thatched mud shelters”—“awareness” and

“active participation” are what sets them apart (102, 105). How are mindfulness and engagement

33 While Bachelard beautifully describes our “first world” (place) as the house, it is not my intention to follow his lead. In the previous chapter I define the body as our first place. My sentiments lie with Edward Casey on this matter rather than with M. Bachelard.

127 achieved in the human creation of a built environment that both sustains identity and establishes place—through Tuan’s antecedent to place—a pause: “A person is most aware when he has to pause and decide” (103). Tuan claims that built environments that separate the natural world from the humanly constructed one help establish a person’s identity: “The built environment clarifies social roles and relations. People know better who they are and how they ought to behave when the arena is humanly designed rather than nature’s raw edge” (102). Casey similarly suggests that one’s identity and place are inseparable—that is, one must know one’s identity to be in place, and, in turn, one must be in place in order to properly know one’s identity.

This wholeness of identity and place is rampant throughout Berry’s writing as well as other agrarian writers. A humanly built dwelling becomes a place with the ability to provide identity when we pause inside it—or in Bachelard’s words, “to curl up . . . to inhabit.” Both Bachelard and Tuan suggest that space becomes place (house becomes home) in our built environment through an active awareness of the place that necessarily inhibits movement. Place is an antidote to the frenetic chaos of the space outside the built environment.

Foote’s characters fight to pause against the onslaught of chaos and violence. His darkest play, “The One-Armed Man” (1985), is the most troubling and clear expression of the effects of a chaotic and violent society upon human place-making.34 Ned McHenry lost his arm to a cotton gin in an industrial accident. He comes to C. W. Rowe, the compassionless and socially religious manager of the cotton gin, to demand the return of his arm—ultimately what he views as the

34 Marian Burkhart writes convincingly about the violence in Foote’s plays: “Still more pervasive and more invidious in all of Foote’s work is violence as Aristotle defined it—an interference with the natural, a perverse refusal to be or to allow others to be what they ought to be” (America 12). While a theatre audience’s conception of violence is often limited to beatings, killings, maimings, and other forms of abuse enacted on-stage, Burkhart suggests that Foote’s violence is somehow more insidious because it is subtle and often reflects our own acts of violence.

128 reclamation of his place through the restoration of his arm. Rowe’s sympathy is shallow, and although he offers to give McHenry a few dollars to tide him over until Christmas, his more insistent rhetoric is that the displaced and broken man ought to patriotically rescue himself in accordance with the American myth:

Well, that’s how it goes, son. My oldest boy had his toe froze off while he was

over in France fighting the Germans, but he don’t let it get him down, not Delbert.

He’s a fine boy. He’s an example to us all. Why, Whitney Taylor lost a leg in a

hunting accident, but that doesn’t keep him from getting around. He rides

horseback every day just like other men. Thomas Edison is deaf as a post and look

at all he’s done in spite of his handicap. (426)

Though the play is short, only running about fifteen minutes, the effect of the place-making pause is compounded when, with his one arm, McHenry points a gun at Rowe’s head and forces him to recite “The Lord’s Prayer,” which, of course, he can’t remember. In that brief pause (“for minutes which seem like hours”) McHenry forces Rowe to mindfully inhabit the reality that his greed and lack of compassion are the catalysts for McHenry’s displacement and that Rowe’s religion is empty and disembodied because it is placeless (One-Act 415). This, just before the one-armed man fires the gun, killing the manager in a moment of uncharacteristic on-stage violence from Foote.35 With the only arm he has left, McHenry fights to pause and inhabit some

35 This is reminiscent of August Wilson’s singular use of on-stage violence in Seven Guitars when Hedley slits Floyd’s throat like a chicken in sight of the audience. The effect is disturbing, but in a sense forces the audience to deeply inhabit the space for a moment. An audience member can look away when the violence happens, but in neither Wilson’s nor Foote’s play is there any warning that the violence will indeed follow. When it happens the audience is stuck in their seats with the overwhelming effect of the impulsive and intentional event. The audience is compelled to pause.

129 place despite the chaos of his life caused by the loss of his arm, and he forces Rowe’s awareness of the place he’s created at the cotton gin.

Foote seems to suggest that McHenry’s defense against the chaos is to heal it in the only way the desperate man knows: to fight the chaos with violence. Rowe is guilty of the initial act of violence in the play: he disregards the humanity of a fellow human being. While Rowe didn’t cause McHenry to lose his arm to the cotton gin, he refused to acknowledge McHenry’s fragile humanity after the accident. He reduced the one-armed man to an object of pity, and finally disdain, after he’d lost his limb and could no longer serve the frenetic capitalist machine whose only goal was efficiency rather than care (Berry, Another Turn 11). This one-act communicates that Foote’s aesthetic of place is not of a utopian cure for the larger problem of displacement.

Rather, the complexities of humanity persist even in the pauses that attempt to ward off the chaos. For Foote, place-making doesn’t provide a panacea for human understanding, but rather a starting place to discuss the complexities of human community against the backdrop of chaos and displacement.

Edward Casey addresses this precise state of place as a foil to chaos that Foote uses when he says that “built places stave off the chaos” (112). In Casey’s estimation, the built environment acts as a “middle ground between nature and culture”—a house is “midway between oriented bodies and the wilderness” (112). For a built place to be able to stave off the chaos of displacement that Foote’s characters experience, Casey suggests two “sufficient conditions” places ought to exhibit (115). First, there must be the possibility for “repeated return” to the built place, and second, “the dwelling place must possess a certain felt familiarity” (116). Through the familiarity with a built dwelling place that comes from “reoccupation,” we are able to bodily

130 inhabit the place (120). Casey proposes that the longer we inhabit a built place (return and familiarly), the more our identities are dependent upon and defined by that place because “built places . . . are extensions of our bodies”—our places take on the shape of ourselves (120).

Barbara Kingsolver identifies this connection between built places and identity in her essay “Knowing Our Place” when she speaks of the Appalachian cabin “where all [her] stories begin” (31). She describes her cabin that “leans noticeably uphill” with its sometime bucolic, sometime harsh surroundings, and asserts that her identity is made by the house: “The truth is, these places own me: They hold my history, my passions, and my capacity for honest work” (31,

37). Kingsolver’s identity-confirming experience in her cabin is echoed in Casey’s suggestion that a built place becomes integral to identity through inhabitation—accomplished through reoccupation and familiarity. Inhabitation, while essential for place-making, is deepened through the cultivation of the built place. Casey returns to the Latin root of cultivate, colere, which means

“to care for,” when discussing the deepening of inhabitation to a state of dwelling, and finally to emplacement:

The most intense interior cultivation—in both senses of interior—is found in the

home. Without such intimate cultivation, a house or apartment or hut remains a

bare habitation, a built place in which inhabitation has not yet occurred and home

has not yet arisen. But this transformation from building to dwelling cannot occur

until cultivation of several sorts, interior and exterior, has taken place. . . . We get

back into place—dwelling place—by the cultivation of built places. Such

cultivation localizes caring. (175)

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To dwell in a built place requires a process of cultivation: “Building in a genuinely cultivational manner . . . leads to dwelling” (176). Wendell Berry suggests that our “so-called identity crisis” comes, in part, because of our inability to cultivate our dwellings—both our bodies and our built places (Unsettling 111). Because we relegate our identities to “the immaterial part of [our] being,” we don’t see how they are materially connected to our physical location (111). His proposed solution to our modern identity crisis is a reconnection with and the cultivation of physical places: “Treatment, it might be thought, would logically consist in the restoration of these connections: the lost identity would find itself by recognizing physical landmarks, by connecting itself responsibly to practical circumstances” (111). To cultivate (to care for) a built place we must pause in it—to reoccupy again and again. Through reoccupation, cultivation of a built place can occur, leading to inhabitation, dwelling, and identity-healing that deepen our emplacement. We know where we are when we know who we are.

If a built environment becomes a place that can heal displacement when its inhabitants cultivate it with awareness through reoccupation and familiarity, how then does one dwell in a built place? Casey relies upon two polarized “modes of dwelling” to navigate the human engagement with the built environment: the hestial and the hermetic (133). The hestial way of dwelling—with its origin in Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth—is in the home. Hestial dwelling is circular: “at once centered and self-enclosed” (133). It is internally focused on the private spaces of the home and expresses a “domestic curvilinearity” (138). While the hermetic way of dwelling—with its origin in Hermes the “god of roads and of wayfarers”—is in open, public spaces (137). This is a dwelling of “urban rectilinearity” that moves outward toward the exterior, wandering through and lingering in the city’s streets (138). Moving from a hestial place

132 to a hermetic place is a shift from “the con-centric” to the “ec-centric”—from moving toward the center to moving away from it (138). Edward Casey’s neologisms con-centric and ec-centric denote a difference in movement through space: the former suggesting circular and vertical movement, and the latter suggesting straight and horizontal movement (138). The concentric cycles to the center, while the eccentric moves in and out linearly. Dwelling concentrically is a centering return to home; dwelling eccentrically is the day-to-day coming and going to and from public places necessitated by living in the city.

Foote uses both kinds of dwelling (concentric and eccentric) for the characters in his

Cycle to establish his aesthetic of place. Characters have to move away eccentrically in order to return concentrically. Both movements are important to their emplacement. This theme of odyssey and return is critical to Gerald C. Woods’ discussion of Foote’s ouvre: “Going away is often a necessity in his plays, and freedom is a goal for all his strongest characters. . . . life is made valuable and humane by the desire for roots and wings” (Intimacy 17). Laurin Porter reiterates the presence of hestial and hermetic dwelling in the plays: “This movement of leaving and returning . . . underlies not just The Orphans’ Home Cycle but all of Foote’s plays in one way or another” (205). She suggests that one of the critical features of Foote’s aesthetic of place that is different from other southern writers is the importance of leaving in order “to achieve individuation and full personhood” (193). Leaving makes identity. Leaving makes place. Carrie

Watts in The Trip to Bountiful, Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies, and Horace Robedaux in the

Cycle all make a transition from the hestial to the hermetic and back to the hestial—an odyssey is necessary for return and the fleshing out of their identities.

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Casey acknowledges that while odyssey and return, hermetic and hestial, eccentric and concentric, can be misinterpreted as an overly simplistic binary of experienced architecture, these

“two ways to dwell” complexly comingle in the day to day inhabitation of built places (109).

Odyssey and return deepen the lived experience of built places. The hestial and hermetic ways of dwelling facilitate return and reoccupation:

Two sorts of scene; two superintending deities; two kinds of bodily engagement;

two means of staying in space; two forms of place; two ways of dwelling-in-

place. But dichotomy and difference do not have the last word when it comes to

dwelling in place. . . . [The binaries] come together in the concrete realm of built

implacement. They come together as Hestes and Hermes come together: as

presiding presences of dwelling. Like these two deities, they are finally two-in-

one, the binarism of opposition yielding to the internally differentiated unity of

dwelling twice over in the same place. (145)

In Foote’s Cycle, Horace Robedaux’s odyssey and return from Harrison cannot be simplified into displacement and emplacement respectively—for one can be displaced either wandering in the city or hovering around the hearth—but rather, both are potential sites for emplacement. More complexly, both odyssey and return must be conjoined in order for Horace to be emplaced through reoccupation in the built environment.

Horton Foote’s own life mirrors this same concentric to eccentric shift. In his memoirs

Farewell (1999) and Beginnings (2001), he chronicles his exit from his childhood home and his eventual return after many years living in California, New York, and New Hampshire. In his

134 lecture “What It Means to Be a Southern Writer,” he identifies his sense of displacement away from Wharton. In New Hampshire,

something in me was profoundly restless, thinking of another place, another time.

I never once felt it was or could be my home. And so it is with New York. I have

lived there off and on for a great deal of my adult life. I love the city and I am

happy there, but I never feel it is home. (Genesis 67)

Like their author, his characters need an odyssey in order to eventually find their identity and place. The word odyssey is one he uses in the play The Trip to Bountiful when Carrie Watts finally escapes from Houston and the prying eyes of her son and daughter-in-law. Foote describes the shifting of built spaces: the apartment shifts far upstage; Carrie moves downstage toward a bare stage and a patch of light; the bus station is built around her as she waits; the apartment disappears; “the beginning of an odyssey” (Bountiful 27). In the shifting of built environments, Foote launches Carrie on a series of adventures that will ultimately cycle back to the Houston apartment. She will have to wander through one built space after another (two bus stations, a bus, and her ancestral home) in order to make her final return to the Houston apartment where she will have to make her place.

In 1942 Foote wrote a group of one-act plays entitled Out of My House, which were performed by the American Actor’s Company. He admitted they were his youthful, “rebellious” attempts “to get out,” but were ultimately “sympathetic to life in the small town”—the characters’ exclamations of escape reiterate this tension of odyssey and return (Davis 303). Even the title of his one-act “Arrival and Departure” (1980) suggests the narrative of odyssey and return critical to Foote’s work. The play was produced as a curtain raiser for “The Road to the

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Graveyard” (1980), a play about a man stuck in a Harrison house that expressionistically suggests the prison it has become:

The action takes place in the dining room—sitting room of the HALL home. It has

once been a fine, well-built, one-story house, with enormous high ceilings. The

wallpaper, once of excellent quality and design, is not faded and stained. The

furniture is dark and old looking, and trees seem to shade all light from the room.

(432)

Sonny’s inability to depart from this crumbling house—the product of a dead-end plantation culture—keeps him from returning to Harrison to find his place. Odyssey is necessary for an emplaced return. These “road stories” are integral to Foote’s broader narrative of place (Spencer

38).

Since the narrative of odyssey and return is a hallmark of Foote’s plays, and neither position is the sole defining characteristic of displacement or emplacement, identifying what determines displacement in Foote’s plays is essential to identify how a built place cures displacement. Returning to Tuan’s dictum that “place is pause” suggests that to be displaced from the built environment is to be in constant motion through that environment—whether by one’s will or through the will of another. It is to make no commitment to dwelling either with the people or with the stuff that exists in that place. It is a lack of cultivation or care for the dwelling place. And, more importantly, displacement is the impossibility of dwelling that results from the chaos of and violence done to a family or culture. In Foote’s Cycle characters experience this impossibility of dwelling both physically and spiritually.

136

Flannery O’Connor provides a poignant example of the kind of displacement Foote seeks to cure in her short story “The Displaced Person” (for which Foote wrote a screenplay in 1977).

It is the narrative of an immigrant Polish family fleeing Hitler’s Reich to the southern United

States. The Guziacs “didn’t have anything of their own, not a stick of furniture or a sheet or a dish, and everything had had to be scraped together out of things that Mrs. McIntyre couldn’t use any more herself” (286-87). The Polish family was forced into displacement; they didn’t choose it willingly. O’Connor describes their displacement by their lack of a built place or the stuff that would communicate their cultivation of the environment: furniture, curtains, dishes, and sheets.

They were forced from one space to another without any time to pause and differentiate between spaces through inhabitation and cultivation—all spaces are the same to the displaced: “the uniformity of space and the equability of time” (Casey 38). The displaced family is in constant movement through space. Like the Guziacs, Foote’s characters are often caught in this incessant flow of space and time. They are looking for a way to become rooted in order to establish their identity. Consequently, in O’Connor’s story the southern women garble the Guziacs’ only identifiable characteristic—their last name—calling them “the Gooblehooks” (286). Even their name has no permanence in their ongoing displacement.

Wood argues that displacement occurs for Foote’s characters when there is a lack of intimacy with people or a built place—when there is no pause in order to establish intimacy. To allow for his characters to overcome their displacement, Foote creates a “personal theater of intimacy” where “everyone is an orphan on an imaginary Texas landscape marked by separation and isolation. . . . By choosing intimacy, his characters find the strength to manage fear and the courage to face the dying of the light” (Wood, Intimacy 8). In his lecture on the Cycle, Foote

137 affirms that Horace is displaced, and the narrative is of his “seeking and finding a home”—he is seeking “a sense of order in disorder, a shape to chaos” (Genesis 120). Displacement occurs when there is no opportunity to pause—no chance for the cultivation of a place against the violence and chaos, and a persistent lack of intimacy with other people and their places.

In “The One-Armed Man,” Ned McHenry has lost his place—both his body and the built environment. He can no longer resist the violence and chaos, and so he gives into it in a desperate attempt to refashion a place. Sonny in “The Road to the Graveyard” is interminably stuck in a dying house and a dying culture consumed with the successes of the past. His place is no-place because he refuses to take the odyssey that might allow him to return and reoccupy. The result is displacement from relationships that might provide a place—he refuses to bring his

“common” girlfriend home to meet his family because of his displacement (One-Act 456). His symptoms are nostalgia, depression, persistent headaches, disorientation, and malaise—Casey’s symptoms of displacement. In the Cycle Horace is displaced when his father dies because his physical place is compromised—his mother and father are divorced, and his mother is moving to

Houston to live with her new husband who has no interest in Horace. This constant state of movement and uncertainty about his place doesn’t allow him to cultivate either a locale or his relationships. Foote’s plays are littered with dislocated characters. Some eventually fight their dislocation like Horace in the Cycle or Carrie Watts in The Trip to Bountiful, while others continue in their displacement like Sonny in “Graveyard” or Lily Dale in the Cycle.

The first two plays in the play-cycle, Roots in a Parched Ground and Convicts, represent

Horace’s displacement. The following three plays, Lily Dale, The Widow Claire, and Courtship, explore the odyssey crucial for Horace’s emplacement. In Valentine’s Day Horace settles in a

138 house and finds emplacement. If Foote had stopped writing his Cycle at this point—when Horace finds a home—his work might have been dismissed as simple nostalgia. Emplacement would have been too neat and easy. The final three plays, 1918, Cousins, and The Death of Papa, represent a critical part of Foote’s displacement cure: loss and return. While this organizational strategy provides a way to discuss the displacement, emplacement, and ongoing cultivation in the

Cycle, there are several other organizational strategies that have been employed by Foote and his scholars. Most notably, Foote’s own reworking of the play-cycle into a trilogy for the 2009-10

New York Signature Theatre Company’s season: The Story of a Childhood, The Story of a

Marriage, and The Story of a Family. Each play is a distillation of three plays—with each act being a one-act version of the longer play. This structure is obviously ideal for the abridged performance of nine three-act plays, but doesn’t serve an analysis of Foote’s narrative of emplacement.

Charles S. Watson organizes the plays into a trilogy after the pattern of the Grove Press

Editions: the first four plays entitled “Youth,” the middle three “Marriage,” and the final two

“Death” (195). Laurin Porter sequentially pairs several plays together in her study of the Cycle.

In response to Porter’s organization, Marian Burkhart proposes a strategy that serves the play- cycle structure: “I found myself responding to [Porter’s sequential pairing] by mating them cyclically, for it is a cycle, beginning, and ending with the death of a father and echoing, as we shall see, the second play in the eighth, and the third in the seventh” (America 25). She explores the plays in a cyclical fashion: Roots in a Parched Ground and The Death of Papa, Convicts and

Cousins, Lily Dale and 1918, and creates a trilogy out of the central plays The Widow Claire,

Courtship, and Valentine’s Day. She also includes Foote’s 2003 play “The Actor” that she

139 identifies as a “coda” to the Cycle—the play is a one-act about Foote himself receiving the “call” to become an actor (25). Burkhart’s organizational strategy provides a valuable way of looking at the cycle structure of the plays, and casts light on the cohesive and cyclical narrative in the

Cycle. A more pointed exploration of displacement and emplacement, however, may be found by tracing Foote’s narrative of place by following Horace’s journey of emplacement through four stages: displacement, odyssey, emplacement, and loss and return. The nine plays that make up the Cycle follow the journey of a man caught in a culture on the brink of yet another change.

Like Wilson’s plays, they can be produced separately as shorter narratives about displacement, odyssey, emplacement, or loss and return. Together, however, they embody an epic narrative of compounding effect about the inevitable changes in a family and a small town.

Although Foote identifies 1918 as the first play he wrote in the Cycle after his parents died, an early version of Roots in a Parched Ground was written nearly fifteen years before the cold New Hampshire winter of 1974. He had long been turning his one-act plays (which had no viable audience at the time) into screenplays, and in 1961, The Night of the Storm was produced by Audrey Gellen for the DuPont Show of the Month. Stark Young saw it on television and encouraged Foote to revise it for the theatre—when he would retitle it Roots in a Parched

Ground, a title taken from the poem “Raleigh was Right” by William Carlos Williams: “Love itself a flower / with roots in a parched ground” (Genesis 116). Young was to write a preface for the initial publication of Roots but he fell ill and was unable to finish it. The short paragraph he completed was published with the 1962 version of the script—which is the script for the 1961 screenplay. Foote includes the full text of his friend’s brief introduction in his 1993 lecture on

140 the Cycle.36 Young’s fondness for the play ultimately became an important catalyst for the playwright’s leap into writing the most important work of his career: “Ever so often through the years, I would think of Stark’s love for the play and his belief in it, and I would consider reworking it” (Genesis 117). Years later, after writing 1918 and Convicts, Foote returned to his initial script after finally understanding how it fit into the play-cycle.37

Roots and Convicts narrate a culture and its people in vertiginous flux from 1902 to 1904.

Foote discusses the mass dislocations that occurred during this period in the South in his

Introduction to the first four plays:

The time of the plays is a harsh time. They begin in 1902, a time of far reaching

social and economic change in Texas. The aftermath of Reconstruction and its

passions had brought about a white man’s union to prevent blacks from voting in

local and state elections. But in spite of political and social acts to hold onto the

past, a way of life was over, and the practical, the pragmatic were scrambling to

form a new economic order. (xii)

36 “When I read ‘Roots in a Parched Ground,’ I am so touched by the purity of tone, the precision of writing, of beautiful love, devotion and sweetness that its tragedies are scarcely horrors in themselves at all. The little boy, Horace, as the hero of the play, carries always the bitterness of pain which overshadows every moment. He is the gentlest and sweetest child I have ever encountered in a story. And at the end of the play, when Horace is left alone, there is that tiny shadow of a mother, the movement of the dying father, so perfect in all that wonderness of his—these shone on and filled the boy’s mind there among the shadows in the old empty house, the men and shadows of the day and his heart. We are talking about lovely things, about sweet people” (Young in Roots 5). 37 Foote recalls that Convicts was possibly written after he completed 1918 because he mentioned it to actor and friend Robert Duvall after his performance in A Young Lady of Property. Foote told Duvall: “I feel I have written your Lear in Convicts” (Genesis 117). The actor went on to play the role of Soll, the blasphemous and drunk plantation owner, in the 1991 film with James Earl Jones. Foote remembers Duvall “was the first to read any of the plays in the cycle” (118). It seems fitting that the actor who best expresses the spirit and aesthetic of Foote’s work (along with his daughter Hallie Foote), and who has famously embodied Foote’s most important characters, would be the first to read a play from the playwright’s most enduring theatrical feat. Robert Duvall first appeared on film as Boo Radley in Foote’s Academy Award winning screenplay of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962. He went on to appear in many of Foote’s films: The Chase (1966), Tomorrow (1973) (an adaptation of Faulkner’s short story), Tender Mercies (1983), and Convicts (1991).

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The “social dislocations” of both black and white and the changing make-up of the small town are at work in twelve-year-old Horace’s world (Burkhart, America 27). Wood suggests that

Foote often uses houses to “offer a crucial sense of safety” for characters in a milieu of dislocation and violence (Intimacy 13). But in the first two plays, there are no houses of safety.

There is only movement through undefined spaces.

Roots introduces the narrative of Horace Robedaux’s dislocated childhood that will affect the rest of the Cycle. In the play Horace’s parents are separated, and his mother Corella has arrived from Houston with his sister Lily Dale to wait for her husband’s death so she can marry

Pete Davenport—a railroad man from Houston. The setting establishes the two houses in the play belonging to Horace’s grandparents—his mother’s family the Thorntons and his father’s family the Robedauxs—and the ongoing cooling relationships between the two families. By the end of the first act, Big Horace dies in Foote’s characteristic understated violence and death—he was “killed by whiskey and cigarettes and worry” (Roots 31). In the second act Corella returns to visit Harrison after marrying Pete Davenport. Her new husband is a harsh man who has no interest in taking on the responsibility of rearing the twelve-year-old Horace, and the Robedauxs have sold their house and are moving to East Texas. The play ends with the boy headed “uptown to look for empty whiskey bottles” to sell to make enough money to buy his father a tombstone

(72).

Convicts picks up the narrative a few months later on Christmas Eve, 1904. Albert

Thornton, Horace’s gambling uncle, secured the thirteen-year-old boy a job on the Gautier plantation working for the drunken owner, Mr. Soll. He employs convicted criminals to work the worn-out and infertile land—a bleak reminder of the effects of slavery and a crumbling white

142 aristocracy. While Horace can leave the plantation to go back to Harrison for Christmas, he is waiting for Soll to pay him for his last six months of work—money he is earning in order to buy the tombstone for his father’s grave. The drunken plantation owner is in decline like the society that created this plantation and its system of enslavement and dislocation. He can’t remember

Horace’s name, that he owes him money, or why he’s even there. While the first half of the play occurs in and around the plantation store where the black couple Martha and Ben Johnson live and work (and where Horace sleeps), the second half occurs in Soll’s room in the plantation house. Soll orders a wooden coffin to be made by the convicts and brought to his room. He gets inside and falls asleep. Horace and the overseer, Jackson Hall, presume him dead, and Horace observes: “He was alone in his coffin when he died” (126). They plan his bleak funeral while he sleeps—one that no family will attend, at which few words will be spoken:

HORACE. We can say the Lord’s Prayer. He didn’t say we couldn’t do that.

BEN. No.

HORACE. And you could testify. He didn’t say you couldn’t do that.

BEN. No. (Pause.) I can say he always worked hard; I can say that.

JACKSON. And I could say he let me be a trustee; I could say that. And he drank

a lot of whiskey. (127)

At this point Soll rallies one final time. Moments later he unceremoniously dies while sitting in a chair expressing his dying wishes to not be buried near his family—he believes they stole his money and land. Unlike Big Horace’s death, where his mourning family (albeit a crumbling one) surrounds him, Soll’s death is no loss to his drunken niece and her husband, the plantation

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(which will return to wilderness), or the convicts that work the land. The only loss is to Horace who goes uncompensated for his many months of work.

From the moment the first play opens, there is a sense that Foote will provide neither the audience nor the characters a place to settle into and pause. The setting is a kind of no-place described as “fluid” and “defined by the lights and a few furnishings and props”— a representation of the sparse lives and decline of the former southern aristocracy (5). Convicts is similarly arranged. Both settings—the store on the Gautier plantation and a room in the plantation house—are adorned with “rudimentary items” (Convicts 77). Sparse stages don’t necessarily represent displacement, but in the Cycle the settings of the plays become increasingly fleshed out as Horace finds his place and cultivates it—houses appear out of the Coastal Plain. In both plays, Horace has no place to settle; as the plays progress, his settlement in any built place seems unlikely. In Roots he is in constant flux between the two ill-defined houses and the open space that represents the alley and the river bank; in Convicts, where places are only negligibly more defined, he would rather sleep on the floor near the fire in the plantation store than in the plantation house near Soll. Horace’s father is dead, his paternal grandparents move to East Texas without warning, his stepfather has no interest in bringing him to Houston, he works for a violent drunkard on a dying prison plantation, and he witnesses at least three deaths in the course of both plays. He is dislocated and seemingly at the mercy of violence and chaos without a house of safety.

Gerald C. Wood points out that Horace is present for the death of his “surrogate father”

Soll Gautier, while he is absent at his own father’s death (and funeral). In this way, “it is through

Soll that Horace gets the chance to revisit his problems with his father” (Intimacy 73). In Roots

144 both families, and Corella in particular, try to shield the boy from the painful realities that occur; in Convicts those painful realities (which are inevitable and necessary) are portrayed as common and pervasive. Foote never shies away from putting even his child characters in the way of the violence and chaos of society. In the most shocking moment of violence in Convicts, a man

Horace is guarding tells him the story of a black convict caught in the act of stealing a cow in order to stay alive: “And they caught him as he was butchering one of the cows he stole, and they grabbed him and sewed him up alive in the carcass of that cow as an example to all the cattle thieves” (86). These moments seem to be essential to their final emplacement. Throughout the

Cycle, Lily Dale is sheltered from the chaos (both by others and willfully by herself), and she is never fully emplaced by the play-cycle’s end. For Foote, a direct experience of the chaos is necessary for final emplacement.

Although without a place in which to escape, Horace ironically attempts to create a place that will establish his identity by purchasing a tombstone for his father’s grave. His persistent questions directed at other characters inquire about where someone is buried, if they have a tombstone, and what their full name is. Without a dwelling place to cultivate for himself and

(seemingly) without any concerned guardian to provide a place, Horace is driven to cultivate his father’s memory and place by providing a marker with his name and a narrative of his identity.

Ben ends the second play speaking the last rites over the house and land: “The house will go, the store will go, the graves will go, those with tombstones and those without” (133). Foote seems to suggest that even those with tombstones eventually descend into namelessness and placelessness.

The next two plays in the play-cycle, Lily Dale and The Widow Claire, were written several years apart. Lily Dale was written along with the other seven plays in the Cycle, but

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Foote wrote The Widow Claire after completing the other eight and after Robert Geller (the producer of the American Short Story series for public television) read them. In 1976 Foote decided the plays would be best suited, and widely viewed in order, if they were done on public television. After reading them, Geller suggested that the Cycle needed one more play, and Foote wrote The Widow Claire.38

In order to find a place, Foote’s characters are required to go on a journey that will potentially leave them more displaced than they already are. They must embrace their odyssey and often wander in order to return to their final emplacement. Characters that either refuse to leave (Sonny in “Road to the Graveyard”) or leave as a means to escape and forget the past (Lily

Dale) are stuck in a no-place. Porter suggests that the way a character can find “redemption” in

Foote’s plays is “only through the pain of leaving home, whatever form that takes, of confronting one’s sense of loss and moving forward into the future, making new connections finding new sources of meaning” (Orphans’ 205). Characters must dwell hermetically—an eccentric way of dwelling that forces them out into public places where they must explore their identities as they move outward from the hearth and its surrounding built structure. Hermetic dwelling happens in

38 Lily Dale was produced by Showtime Television in 1996 and included Mary Stuart Masterson, Stockard Channing, and Sam Shepard in its cast. The fifth play in the play-cycle, Courtship, was also made into a film by Lilian V. Foote (Horton’s wife) in 1987 and starred Hallie Foote as the playwright’s mother Elizabeth. It introduces the relationship between Foote’s parents. The playwright noted that the subject of this play was the meat of his childhood broodings—most notably his grandparent’s objection to his parent’s marriage (Genesis 124). Courtship was the first of the plays to be produced on-stage. It was directed by the playwright himself in 1978 at the HB Playwright’s Foundation, and featured Hallie Foote as Elizabeth. Both The Widow Claire and Lily Dale were first produced in New York in 1986. Widow Claire was produced at the Circle in the Square Theatre where Hallie Foote played the Widow, and Lily Dale was produced at the Samuel Beckett Theatre and starred Molly Ringwald (241-61).

146 the streets of the city. To ignore this way of dwelling is to jeopardize one’s emplacement.

Isolation and emplacement are not the same thing.

Both Lily Dale and Widow Claire address the characters’ move to Harrison’s closest metropolis, Houston. It is 1910 and Horace’s mother and sister have moved to the city with Pete

Davenport. Consequently, Horace’s stepfather is employed by the railroad—a vocation that facilitates constant movement. Pete, Corella, and Lily Dale’s lives are shot through with the affects of displacement even though they seem to dwell in a house that emplaces them. Built structures, or even houses (that seem like homes), are not the only prerequisite for emplacement.

While Horace is without a steady built environment in which to be emplaced, his odyssey moves him toward emplacement—even while he wanders his identity is being shaped. Lily Dale opens and closes with Horace’s trip to and from Houston where he encounters Mrs. Coons—an over bearing, but well-meaning Baptist woman who is concerned about Horace’s ultimate emplacement in baptism and the church. She is currently renting the Robedaux house where

Horace’s father died. He works at a store in Glen Flora—a town within three-hours walking distance of Harrison—and walks home every weekend to see his aunts. His visit to Houston is an attempt to reach out to his mother and sister and potentially find his place in the city:

HORACE. Well, I just thought it might be nice to live near you and Mama for a

change.

LILY DALE. Oh, you couldn’t live here, Brother. There is no room here at all.

HORACE. I didn’t mean here. I meant somewhere in Houston, but near you.

LILY DALE. What could you do in Houston, Brother?

HORACE. Maybe I could get a job working in a store.

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LILY DALE. Have you ever been in a store in Houston?

HORACE. No.

LILY DALE. Well, you’d change your tune if you ever did. They have beautifully

dressed men and women working in those stores. Cultured men and women. Not

country people. (Lily 151)

While Horace falls ill during his visit to Houston and is forced to stay for three weeks while he recovers, he repeatedly attempts to leave the house despite his delirium. Whether it is to look for work or to wander through the streets until he finds his way to the train station, Horace makes an effort to dwell hermetically—to search for his identity by moving linearly away from the house and into the city. Foote places him on the living-room couch throughout the length of the play where his need for eccentric dwelling is impeded by forced concentric dwelling. His confinement to the house is temporary, but the friction between his leaving and his confinement is necessary because it ultimately allows him to take an odyssey away from his mother and sister. They are no longer a place in which Horace can dwell. As the play closes on the train, Horace meets Mrs.

Coons again and begs her to pray for him, Corella, and Lily Dale—“a prayer for those who have lost their way” (Wood, Intimacy 75). Despite her flaws, Foote uses the woman to proffer grace to the wandering Horace. Emplacement can occur while wandering, and even the seemingly small- minded and flawed are a means of emplacement on the journey.

Horace’s berth on the living-room couch provides him a vantage point from which to view his sister’s profound displacement. Unlike her brother, the eighteen-year-old Lily Dale dwells hestially—insistently hovered around the hearth of the house Pete Davenport provides— however, she is displaced because she doesn’t want to leave the house or see the past as a way to

148 fully develop her identity.39 Wood suggests that she is without a home: “She lives an unrecognized existence and has no identity” (75). Her stepfather encouraged her to stop going to school three years before, so she stays at home playing the piano and composing rags that all sound the same. Her engagement to Will Kidder, an opportunity for her to leave the house, only promises to keep her more contained:

LILY DALE. I’m never going to leave you, and you are never going to leave me.

CORELLA. When you marry, you will have to leave me, sweetheart, and live

with your husband.

LILY DALE. Why can’t Will move in here with us?

CORELLA. That wouldn’t be practical, darling.

LILY DALE. That’s what Will says too. Anyway, we’ll get a house next door and

if we can’t do that, as close as we can. (Lily 202)

Her fear of leaving the house is indicative of her ignorance and fear of sex. She is also unwilling to retain her memory of her past. Horace reminds her of the song “Lily Dale” that her father used to sing to her and mistakenly suggests she’ll sing it to her own children—he is unaware that she refuses to discuss sex or the pain of childbirth. The diatribe that she launches into at her brother’s suggestion that she might have children reveals her self-imposed forgetfulness and her resulting displacement:

39 When Horace arrives at the house, Lily Dale is terrified to open the door because she believes her brother is a gypsy. She is fearful to leave the house or answer the door because the city is full of danger: “Doris Violet tells me the city is alive with beggars and gypsies and white slavers. She says her mother forbid her ever to open her door. . . . The city is filled with danger, Brother. The white slavers put a pill in your tea or coffee that knocks you out and then they carry you off to China and force you to become a prostitute” (144-45).

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I want to forget everything that happened back then. Everything. I want my

children to know about happy times, pleasant things. I don’t want to tell them

about drunkards and dying and not having enough to eat. And I want you to quit

talking to me about it. Every time I feel the least bit good you begin on all that.

What did Papa call us? What did Papa sing? Did Papa do this? Did Papa do that? I

don’t care about him. How many times do I have to tell you that? I don’t care if I

ever hear his name again. Mr. Davenport is my father. I want no other. You have

no father, but that’s not my fault. I have one—the only one I want. (189)

While she seems to be emplaced, she turns the house into a prison where she clings to a present built upon a falsified vision of the past—nostalgia in all its thinly gilded glory, a nostalgia resulting from her displacement: a false view of the past, an impotent movement into the future, and a facile present predicated on self-deception.

The Widow Claire furthers Horace’s eccentric dwelling two years after his visit to

Houston. He is again preparing to go to Houston to go to business school where he hopes to become a “traveling man” (Widow 226). The play takes place in one night and centers on his relationship with a widowed woman he is seeing with whom he presumably has a sexual relationship. It is the only play of Foote’s in the Cycle that deals expressly with Horace’s sexuality—Wood argues that it is the only play in the Cycle that doesn’t further a narrative of home, but is instead a narrative of “transition” (Intimacy 76). Rather than seeking to settle down,

Horace is seeking “transitory relationships” that “are necessary and valuable”—“an erotic dimension is integral to human affairs” (77). Despite Claire’s singleness, she is fearful of what the neighbors might think and will only smoke and dance with Horace indoors with the curtains

150 drawn. She will also only kiss him if they are inside. In contrast, Horace chooses to dwell in the streets of the city. The play takes place back and forth between Claire’s house and Horace’s room at the boarding house where he lives. Horace moves back and forth between the two places in the course of the evening—at one point even getting into a fight in the street with one of

Claire’s drunk and violent pursuers. While definitely a departure from the other eight plays of the play-cycle, Widow Claire establishes the necessary odyssey that Horace undertakes as part of his emplacement. He cannot become emplaced by hastening his concentric dwelling within a house like his sister and mother have done, but he has to move throughout the city to explore his emplacement—to dwell outwardly (Casey 137).

In Lily Dale and The Widow Claire, Horace effectively takes an odyssey that facilitates his dwelling outside of a built space. In the fifth play, Courtship, Foote introduces Elizabeth

Vaughn’s impending odyssey from her house against the backdrop of Horace’s life as a traveling salesman. The play is set in 1915 at the Vaughns’ house in Harrison where the gallery surrounding the house is fully realized, but the interior of the house (the music room) is “defined by a scrim” (Courtship 3). The interior of the built structure is ephemeral and ghost-like, while the exterior space—or the middle space—is realized. Elizabeth spends a good portion of the play on the porch that appears to circumnavigate the Vaughn house. While the Widow Claire is fearful of being seen kissing Horace on the porch, Elizabeth defies her father (and the social structure of the tiny town) by kissing Horace on the porch. Elizabeth dwells in the middle space, or the “interplace,” where she navigates the space “between dwelling-as-residing and dwelling- as-wandering” (Casey 126). Claire is indecisive about her romantic relationships and fearful of the prevailing social structure—so staying inside is safe. Elizabeth, however, displays no

151 indecisiveness about Horace or fear of her father. Her dwelling place in the between on the porch gives her courage to leave—the same odyssey Horace has already made. By play’s end, she moves from residing to wandering.

Just beyond the porch, couples dance across the stage throughout the place, going unseen by the characters in the play. The whole space seems in flux because of this repetitive movement.

The subject of the play is Elizabeth’s determination to leave home and eventually marry Horace, despite her parents’ disapproval. The narrative is shot through with the tragic story of Sybil

Thomas who goes into labor, loses her child, and dies on the same day of her wedding. While

Elizabeth’s parents use the story as a cautionary tale to warn her from ever marrying and leaving home, it becomes a tale of how Sybil and other girls her age are driven to a secret odyssey by the narrow constraints of the small town. Despite the potential for human tragedy—which repeatedly arises in the play—Elizabeth is determined to leave. At the end of the play, after her mother and father dismiss her wants and repeat their disdain for Horace, she determines to leave the already ephemeral place:

ELIZABETH (to herself). I’m marrying Horace Robedaux . . . if he asks me.

MRS. VAUGHN (reappearing). Did you say something, Elizabeth?

ELIZABETH. No Ma’am.

MRS. VAUGHN. Oh, I thought you did. (She goes.)

ELIZABETH. I’m marrying Horace Robedaux.

LAURA. If he asks you.

ELIZABETH. If he asks me. (Courtship 49)

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Elizabeth, like Horace in the previous two plays, knows that her odyssey will most certainly result in a displacement from her family. But despite the loss of a concentric, hestial dwelling place, the eccentric odyssey—embodied by the prevalent external dwelling in Lily Dale, Widow

Claire, and Courtship—is necessary to allow for emplacement. Heretofore in the Cycle built dwelling places have remained ephemeral and loosely defined. Foote, however, begins to define structures in a more permanent way in the subsequent plays.

Marian Burkhart organizes her exploration of the Cycle around the three central plays

(Widow Claire, Courtship, and Valentine’s Day), calling them “the center of Foote’s epic”

(America 79). And while together they numerically behave as a central group to the play-cycle, one play, Valentine’s Day, tells an important central narrative of the Cycle—that of emplacement. While this doesn’t make the play any more important than the others—to rank one narrative over another in Foote’s aesthetic-of-the-persistent-commonplace would seem unwise—

Valentine’s Day establishes a more thorough exploration of how emplacement persists, and cultivation continues despite the chaos and violence.40

As a narrative of emplacement, Valentine’s Day shows how pausing in and reoccupying the built environment allow Horace, Elizabeth, their neighbors, and family to find their place.

Like the other plays in the Cycle, the play takes place against a chaotic image of Harrison. It is

Christmas Eve 1917, and Horace and Elizabeth live in a small, rented room. They eloped against her parents’ wishes on Valentine’s Day nine months before, and the Vaughns haven’t spoken to them since. The murder trial of a local man who killed a banker on Main Street while witnesses

40 Hallie Foote reprised her role as Elizabeth both in the 1980 stage production in New York at the HB Playwrights Foundation and in the 1986 film of the same name produced by her mother (Genesis 242, 259).

153 watched is the talk of the town—he is eventually found not guilty even though the victim’s daughter witnessed the murder. Elizabeth’s younger brother is knee-deep in his gambling addiction. Horace’s mentally ill uncle, George Tyler, comes in and out of the apartment, threatens to kill himself if he can’t see the grave of the woman he was in love with as a young man, and eventually commits suicide in the street. Looking for consolation and an escape from his mother, the drunken Bobby Pate returns unannounced to the apartment again and again. This background suggests the complex social reality that is commonplace in Harrison, and Foote establishes a place in Horace and Elizabeth’s apartment situated in the midst of the chaos. Their rented room is a place where characters return and pause in order to heal their identities.

While Horace’s emplacement seems to be the most pertinent since the Cycle’s narrative arch follow his search for a home, his emplacement in Valentine’s Day—he has found a home with Elizabeth in which he dwells through return and cultivation—allows for others in the community to find a place. Because finding one’s place in a built dwelling requires repetition and return, it is an ongoing process that must be cultivated. Despite having a dwelling place,

Horace still desires a house that he can call his own:

I’m no orphan, but I think of myself as an orphan, belonging to no one but you. I

intend to have everything I didn’t have before. A house of my own, some land, a

yard, and in that yard I will plant growing things, fruitful things, fig trees, pecan

trees, pear trees, peach trees . . . and I will have a garden and chickens. (83)

His desire for a stable, built dwelling extends into a stable dwelling on the land. His cultivation of a built structure repeats itself in his cultivation of the land. Becoming emplaced is also a totality of experience—it is both the result of the repeated experience in a built place and the

154 cultivation of a place that allows for continued experience. Emplacement is both caused by experience and results in experience. Horace’s emplacement in Valentine’s Day is caused by his repeated, ongoing experiences in this rented room, as well as its behavior as a place where ongoing experiences are cultivated. Casey doesn’t limit built places to the purposes of “shelter or prestige or comfort,” but also for the “foster[ing of] experiences that appear purposeless at first glance” (Casey 121). In Foote’s play, these seemingly pointless experiences involve both the marginal and central members of the Harrison community.

Elizabeth and Horace’s apartment is a revolving door of visitors seeking a place. The small apartment is one room packed with a Christmas tree, a bed, a dresser, a couple of chairs, and a crib for the coming baby. Despite the size, the room is often filled with visitors who come in without warning and who seem to be looking for a way to stop the inevitabilities. Bessie

Stillman, a young neighbor girl, arrives each morning to sit and talk with Elizabeth—she is a constant figure in the room both in Valentine’s Day and 1918. Although she behaves as a confidant for Elizabeth, to whom Elizabeth admits her fears about Horace and her parents’ aging and dying, the young girl opens up about her own difficult home life and her father’s unhappiness. Bessie never knocks upon entering and treats the small room as her own place.

Because Elizabeth treats the girl as her equal and allows her some agency over the small room by encouraging her daily return, Bessie finds her place in the apartment. In the same way Elizabeth fosters Horace’s emplacement, she fosters Bessie’s as well by encouraging her return and experience in the apartment. Bessie’s emplacement results in her place-oriented stability that benefits everyone who enters the house.

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Another kind of reoccupation occurs through Bobby Pate and George Tyler’s repeated returns to the apartment. Unlike Bessie who is a stabilizing figure, their arrivals explicitly demonstrate the persistent chaos of the social order. The drunken Bobby wanders in and out of the apartment looking for his mother and delivering the news of George Tyler’s suicide. Before his mother takes him to Galveston to take the Keeley Cure (an early twentieth-century attempt at curing alcoholism through institutionalization and chemical treatments), he becomes violent in the apartment when the doctor tries to give him a sedative. He eventually escapes Galveston, where his mother took him to take the Keeley Cure, and returns straight to Elizabeth and

Horace’s apartment to announce his return and tell them of George’s suicide. He reoccupies the apartment, in part, because he rented the room before Horace and Elizabeth; however, he also returns because the room offers him a place in the midst of the chaos. Horace, Elizabeth, and

Bessie never speak to him differently than how they speak to their sober visitors:

BOBBY. Excuse me for disturbing you at this time of night, but I’m looking for

my mother.

ELIZABETH. Oh, Mr. Bobby, she’s gone to your brother’s in Bay City.

BOBBY. Is this Christmas?

ELIZABETH. Christmas Eve.

BOBBY. Christmas Eve?

ELIZABETH. Yes.

BOBBY. What is the year, please?

ELIZABETH. 1917.

BOBBY. 1917? And we’re at war?

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ELIZABETH. Yes. I think your mother thought you were going with her to Bay

City.

(BOBBY leaves.)

BOBBY (offstage). Mama . . . Mama . . .

(ELIZABETH goes to the door and opens it.)

ELIZABETH. She’s not here, Mr. Bobby. She’s gone to Bay City for Christmas.

BOBBY. Oh, yes. (He looks around the room.) What a pretty Christmas tree!

May I come in and see it?

ELIZABETH. Why, certainly! (Valentine’s 58-59)

George Tyler is treated with the same regard when he makes his visits. Like Bobby, he represents chaos in the social order. As the play progresses it is revealed that George is likely mentally ill. He was in love with Horace’s Aunt Mary but was unable to marry her; he instead married a woman from Louisiana named Sarah. Something about this course of events has driven him mad and resulted in his placelessness. He says to Horace, “Do you know the way to my home? . . . Will you take me there? I’m very confused. I tried to get there twice, but I’m confused” (90). He returns several times to the apartment to speak with Horace or Elizabeth. The final time he returns is in the middle of his suicide attempt—he’s been running around town with a gun threatening to shoot himself if he can’t see Mary’s grave. Horace calmly speaks with him in the apartment—letting him lead the conversation and trying to provide help:

GEORGE. They think I’m crazy, you know. I do get terrible headaches,

sometimes, and I can’t think then, but I wouldn’t harm anybody. Once I tried to

kill Sarah, but I didn’t mean it. I don’t know why I did. I took a butcher knife on

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Christmas Eve and I chased her all around the house. I’m glad I didn’t kill her. I

would have been sorry if I had. I need help, you know. But nobody here can help

me. I’m going out there now and I want you to go with me, son, and I want you to

tell them for me I need help. And if I can’t get it I want them to kill me, because I

don’t want to go on like this. Will you tell them that for me? (92)

Like Bobby, George finds a place in the apartment with Elizabeth and Horace. It is where he reveals the truth of his mental torture, and where he doesn’t encounter pity but an acknowledgement of his complex identity.

The final group of people who enter the apartment looking for a place is Elizabeth’s family. After almost a year of silence, they arrive on Christmas day to deliver presents. They seem to be entirely unaware of the significance of the day on which they are reconciling. Despite the title, the play is really a Christmas play—Foote’s understated narrative of forgiveness and reconciliation is without sentimentality as it plays itself out in front of murder, suicide, drunkenness, and mental illness.41 Even the Vaughns’ reconciliation with the Robedauxs is without fanfare and tears—there are no long apologies, nor tearful acceptances, only the exchange of gifts. Horace, whom Mr. and Mrs. Vaughn objected to, hands them their presents, and Mr. Vaughn’s simple “thank you” suggests their reconciliation. After the Vaughn’s

Christmas-day visit, they reoccupy the apartment in every other scene of the play. Near the end of the play (sometime in January), Mr. Vaughn offers to build Horace and Elizabeth a house—an

41 The play is reminiscent of The Second Shepherd’s Play in this regard. Both are Christmas stories that don’t treat the subject of reconciliation and forgiveness with a sentimental eye but, instead, place the narrative in the midst of commonplace human grotesqueries. The effect of the contrast doesn’t allow the audience to settle into a bleary- eyed sentimental response to the Christmas narrative. Rather, it forces them to set the narrative against the persistent realities of violence and chaos.

158 offer Horace declines—and in an uncharacteristic moment of self-revelation reveals why he comes to visit so often and why he wants to provide a house for the couple:

There’s peace in this room and contentment. That’s why I like to come here, I

think. I said to Mrs. Vaughn, “They don’t have much, but they’re contented. You

feel that.” I hope you find contentment in your new home. I’d buy that for you, if

I could, but of course, you know things like that can’t be bought. (103)

Mr. Vaughn articulates why all the characters reoccupy the apartment—Horace and Elizabeth invite their return because they have made the small room into a place of rest through of their own emplacement; not an emplacement predicated upon isolation from the chaos, but emplacement that brings the chaos to the threshold and invites it in to rest—never denying its existence or its potential to be quieted for a few moments.

The play ends, not with a sentimental vignette of home that begs for a nostalgic return to a simpler and more hospitable time in Harrison, but with a troubling story from Bobby about

Edgar Lee wearing his sister’s dress and the father who “whipped Edgar until he bled” in the front yard (107). Elizabeth responds to Bobby’s story with the hope of future cultivation in their new house and the foreshadowing of death that is an important foil to hope in Foote’s aesthetic:

“I hope to have all kinds of roses in our yard after our house is built. Red roses, yellow roses, pink roses, sweetheart roses, and climbing roses” (107). The contrast of these two images is disturbing—while Bobby tells of the horrors of a violent father ashamed of his son, Elizabeth imagines a future in a house surrounded by roses. While the roses certainly foreshadow the inevitability of death in Foote’s world, is Elizabeth’s idealization of roses a denial of the chaos surrounding her? Is Foote proposing that aesthetic experience can negate society’s trauma—the

159 world can be cured by beauty? Or is he suggesting that flawed people continue to build places to spite the chaos? The ending doesn’t suggest emplacement occurs via a nostalgic return to 1917, or by denying the chaos, or through the simplistic curative effects of beauty. Instead, places are made through difficult acts of cultivation—acts that require open eyes about the violence and loss that surround, a determination to create a place in spite of the terror, and the inevitability of death; acts that create the possibility for place-healing.42

If the Cycle ended with Horace and Elizabeth building a house in which they hide themselves away from the trouble of Harrison—the madness, alcoholism, untimely deaths, beatings, poverty, and racism—a rose-decked house where they exclusively dwell concentrically around the hearth and reject eccentric dwelling with their neighbors in the streets of Harrison, then emplacement has no curative powers over the incessant movement of modernity. Finding one’s place would only come to those with the privilege of hearth and house and through the self-imposed isolation from the chaos—not unlike Lily Dale. The couple’s growing emplacement expands into the linear built places away from their house where they connect with their family and neighbors. This is tested and deepened in the final three plays through the exploration of loss and return.

42 Foote makes it clear that he is not trying to revive a sentimental view for small towns (and their mythic values) in his 1988 interview with Ronald L. Davis for the Southwest Review. In fact, he seems to be attempting a de- sentimentalizing of all places—small town or big city: “No, I’m not sentimental about small towns. I know how destructive they can be. But so can the cities and so can the farms and so can the Left Bank of Paris and Greenwich Village. That’s just part of life. I honestly do want to cast a cold eye, if you will. Isn’t that what’s on Yeats’s tomb? An unsentimental eye. But no sense of superiority and no sense of condemnation. Actually, the first three plays are about the abandonment of the boy, and they’re pretty rough” (313). He suggests that sentimentalizing places is a natural human condition—“just part of life”—and that in order to live in those places (to be emplaced in them), we have to cast off their glossy nostalgia.

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Beginning with 1918 when the Robedauxs move into their new house and experience their first loss rivaling the death of Horace’s father, followed by Horace’s return to Houston during Corella’s illness in Cousins, and concluding with a parallel loss to Roots in The Death of

Papa with the sudden death of Mr. Vaughn, the final three plays show the inevitability of loss, the necessity of return, and how the cultivation of place creates stability in the face of fragility.

Their two-fold dwelling place—in the built environment of their house and in the built environment of Harrison—and their reoccupation of places stabilize their emplacement in the face of change.43

The opening scene of 1918 returns Horace to the graveyard where his father was buried in Roots. Valentine’s Day looked forward to a cultivated place where Horace, Elizabeth, and their daughter would make a home, but 1918 immediately returns to the persistence of loss.

When the play opens Horace is awaiting the tombstone he has ordered for his father’s grave—a marker for his place and his memory—and by the end of the play, he returns to the graveyard to visit the grave of his infant daughter, Jenny, who died in the flu epidemic. He discovers he might have placed his father’s tombstone on the wrong unmarked grave:

HORACE. Mrs. Boone says Cousin Minnie was wrong, and we have the

tombstones on the wrong graves. Isn’t that a mess?

ELIZABETH. Well, Mrs. Boone could be wrong, too. (1918 174)

43 Produced in 1985, 1918 was part of the trilogy of films produced by Lillian Foote (along with Courtship and Valentine’s Day), and was the chronologically first of the three to be produced. It was produced on-stage six years prior to the making of the film in 1979 (a year after Courtship) by the HB Playwright’s Foundation, was directed by the playwright, and again starred Hallie Foote as Elizabeth (Genesis 242, 258). Cousins was first produced in 1983 in Los Angeles at the Loft Theatre, and The Death of Papa was first produced in 1997 outside of New York at the Playmakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Hallie Foote again played Elizabeth, and Matthew Broderick reprised his film role as Brother Vaughn (Intimacy 118, Genesis 249).

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Loss persists, and monuments to the dead are fragile and insufficient. The seventh play of the play-cycle focuses on a series of deaths: the Great War is taking the lives of Harrison’s residents, the flu epidemic decimates the population, and neighbors kill one another over land disputes. In contrast to the losses at home and abroad, babies continue to be born in the midst of the chaos and flu-orphaned children find homes—albeit less than hospitable ones. Marianne Moore’s proposal in her poem that inspired the play-cycle’s title is tested: “Shall we never have peace without sorrow?” Loss is as inevitable as survival. The hope of the play is that the dyings won’t be wasted—that the stability of place will help the Robedauxs survive their loss and teach them how to live.

The repeated graveyard scenes nearly surround the play. They not only remind the audience of the persistence of death but also suggest that life and death are communal events and not isolated occurrences. Harrison is, then, no idyllic community. Horace’s conversation with the caretaker Sam Goldman in the opening scene reveals the continuing and most visible divide in the community: the segregated graveyards and the ongoing disputes that end in murder. Foote, however, makes the point that despite the divisions death comes equally to everyone. Sam says to Horace, “Yes Sir. Everybody’s gettin’ it. Black and white. Not sparin’ anybody” (113). Even the widows of the men who shot one another share the same loss: “Mr. Willis and Mr. Hayhurst shot and kilt each other, both their widows would come out, sometimes be here at the same time, but they wouldn’t speak” (115). The community holds the tension of racial division and the shared burden of grief. Death has a way of isolating characters from one another, but it also forces them to notice the ongoing death surrounding them. Mrs. Vaughn observes the isolation the community experiences because of the flu epidemic: “Everybody was so busy thinking about

162 their own dead they didn’t have time to worry with anyone else’s grief. (Pause.) It’s so quiet isn’t it? War and death seems so far away. So very far away” (159). Although Jenny’s death in the Robedauxs’ new house forces them to turn inward, it ultimately reminds them of the deaths occurring beyond Harrison—they experience a common grief. Mrs. Vaughn’s first observation about the isolating effects of grief is in tension with her second observation about war and death.

The community may be too occupied with their own grief to notice the other flu deaths in

Harrison, but those deaths force them to think about people dying in the war, even though they’re on the other side of the world. Harrison’s isolation (like the rest of America’s) is coming unraveled in the knowledge that comes with world war.

The closing scene briefly returns to the house, establishing the stability the Vaughns’ emplacement provides. Death invaded their place and threatens to disrupt their stability through

Elizabeth’s anxiety about her pregnancy. When Horace arrives home in the final scene, there is the expectation that the chaos of the community will retreat from their doorstep: Elizabeth has just safely delivered Horace Jr., the couple reaffirms their love for one another, and the war has ended. But things don’t return to a safe equilibrium as the play closes: the soldiers who have returned home can’t find jobs, a drunken Brother has once again fled his responsibilities by abandoning the cotton boat he’d been signed on to in Galveston, and the audience knows that the

Great War will not end all wars. Even Mrs. Boone, who is adopting a little boy whose parents were taken by the flu, has no intention of providing long-term stability for the boy—she’s determined to leave everything to her “shiftless brothers” and their children (171). Their place in the structure they’ve built cannot protect them from the inevitability of loss. Only through return to their built place can they sustain even a tenuous stability against the persistent chaos. The play

163 ends with Elizabeth faintly singing the words of a hymn and returning to the image of flowers that in Valentine’s Day represented her hope. This time, however, the flowers are those that were laid on Jenny’s grave: “‘Oh, the peace of God be near us, Fill within our hearts Thy home.’

Sweet peas, cosmos, periwinkle, snapdragons, verbena . . .” (177). The flowers are no longer

Elizabeth’s vision of an imagined future place defined by roses but have become a place in the present where loss has entered their home—her hymnic prayer is a plea for protection from the chaos.

The necessity of return—even return to known chaos—is evident in the eighth play,

Cousins, which acts as a parallel play to Lily Dale. Horace and Elizabeth return to Houston where Corella is hospitalized. Foote remarked:

Cousins, I think is my most difficult play for non-Southerners to understand. Even

for Southerners, I would think now “Times are a-changing.” Still in my day, it

was this cousin and that cousin and he’s your first cousin once removed or your

fourth cousin on your daddy’s side and on and on and on. In between all the

cousins and talk of cousins, one, I hope, senses, the hard realities of the life of my

characters (Genesis 133).

Taking place seven years after the previous play in 1925, Cousins is a chaotic revolving door of family members trying to remember how they are related. Considering the speed at which the lines in the play would be delivered, it would be impossible to follow who is related to whom— the effect is one of incessant movement in and out of the Houston hospital where Corella is having surgery. Following the death of Jenny when Horace and Elizabeth’s emplacement is tested, Cousins further removes the couple from Harrison and an opportunity for isolation.

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Horace must return to Houston and repeat the odyssey he made in Lily Dale, where he was reminded of his dislocation from his mother and sister. This time he returns with Elizabeth—the person with whom he has created a place. She and Harrison have a stabilizing effect on Horace that was absent when he was in Houston the first time.

1918 began and ended in a location outside the built structure of the house, but in

Cousins the entire play takes place outside the house in two separate public locations: Horace’s men’s wear store in the Harrison center square and the Houston hospital. In 1918 the graveyard is ostensibly an eccentric dwelling place where characters linearly navigate the rows of graves, but it also behaves as a concentric dwelling place where characters find public privacy—public concentric dwelling where they privately dwell around a loved one’s grave. In a microcosm of dual dwelling, characters dwell both publically and privately in the graveyard. 1918 complicates eccentric and concentric dwelling, exposing the necessary and complex overlap that is part of being in place. Cousins, however, pushes dwelling further into public, eccentric places where a character’s emplacement is tested. Again, Foote seems to suggest that return to eccentric dwelling is an essential part of long-term emplacement.

Cousins is framed by scenes in Horace’s men’s wear store. The play begins and ends with rain that threatens the cotton crop (a commodity that will soon be superseded by oil), suggesting an economic shift that looms large. Harrison’s economy is dependent upon the cotton crop; and along with the narrative of the declining southern aristocracy in Convicts, Cousins further develops in miniature the seismic economic shift the South is undergoing. Chaos persists in

Harrison: business is slow all over town, cousins murder one another in drunken disputes and escape prosecution, and racist community members refuse to shop at Horace’s store because he

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“prefer[s] the colored trade” (8). Horace’s cousin Gordon, who publically interprets all the family events as people come and go from the store, mindlessly reminds Horace of the conservative financial practices that keep his business unstable:

“Well, Mama,” I said later, after they had gone back to Houston, “Cousin Horace

has responsibilities. He has a wife and two children to support. And bills to pay to

keep his store running, and suppose he had lost the five hundred dollars. What

then?” “Well, he wouldn’t have lost it,” she said. “He would have made millions

by now.” “But he didn’t know that, Mama.” I said. “That’s why he took the five

hundred dollars instead and bought the rent house from Mr. Vaughn.” “A rent

house that is so run-down,” she said, “that only trash will live in it. And who he

can never get to pay their rent.” “That may be,” I said, “but he owns it and he

didn’t lose it and he could have lost five hundred dollars in an oil pool.” But you

can’t argue with Mama as far as Cousin Lily Dale and Cousin Will are concerned.

She thinks the sun rises and sets in Cousin Will. (11)

If money is the mark of success, Horace is failing. He is unwilling to risk his financial security by gambling on a commodity that is detached from humanity because it doesn’t involve a personal and direct exchange of goods. Rather, he trades in clothing and housing; his business shelters the body in place.

In contrast to the rental house Horace bought, Will Kidder, Lily Dale’s husband, purchased a house in Houston. Again, Cousin Gordon tells the story:

And then Cousin Will just laughed like he had heard the funniest thing in the

world and he said: “I am now buying my second home, a two-story brick, in one

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of the nicest Houston suburbs and I am planning to be the richest man in Houston

some day.” (11)

It would seem Lily Dale did indeed leave home, contrary to her early protestations in Lily Dale.

But will this odyssey be the essential step she takes to cure her displacement? Her behavior at the hospital suggests otherwise. Will provides her a dwelling place that ostensibly contains all the artifacts of emplacement: “The best piano, the best rugs, the best living-room furniture, the best dining room set, the best bed-room suite. We have them all. I bought all this, a new house, and two Packards all in the same year” (30). While Lily Dale has amassed all the physical means of emplacement, she continues to search for an identity without the aid of her history or place.

Heretofore, Lily Dale has been unrelenting in her attempt to forget her father—neither attending his funeral, nor wanting to be reminded of the song her father sang to her when she was little.

When Cousin Lola asks how long he’s been dead, Lily Dale doesn’t remember: “Oh I don’t know. How long, Brother?” (63). When asked if she remembers him, however, she quickly—and somewhat defensively—replies: “Of course we do. At least I do. Don’t you, Brother?” (63). She quickly changes the subject to her stepfather, Pete Davenport, and her new house: “I’m so anxious for you to see my pretty new house” (64). The only events of the past she seems intent on remembering are the financial slights:

LOLA. Lily Dale was trying to explain to me about your grandfather being

cheated out of land and jewels and silver and houses.

LILY DALE. And money, too.

LOLA. How was that?

HORACE. I swear I don’t remember.

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LOLA. You don’t?

HORACE. No.

LILY DALE. Well, I remember. Grandpa used to talk about it all the time. He

was very bitter about it. I know that. You remember how bitter he was about it all,

Brother?

HORACE. Yes, I remember that. But that’s all past and what can you do about it?

(61)

Foote suggests that her radical denial of her past, as well as her visits to a fortuneteller who falsely predicts unparalleled musical success that never materializes, are a formula for displacement. She refuses to return to Harrison—even putting off visiting Jenny after she was born and then making up an unlikely excuse when her mother apologizes for never visiting before the infant died: “We all had the flu you know, too” (75). Jenny was born months before the flu outbreak, but Lily and Corella (for reasons Foote doesn’t give) never come to see the baby.

When Lily Dale returns to Harrison in the final scene of the play, she appears only briefly before returning to the car with a headache. While onstage she has one line but otherwise doesn’t engage in the brief conversation about the fake publisher who ran off with the two thousand dollars Will gave him to publish her music. Even the name of her favorite composition, “A

Square Peg in a Round Hole,” indicates her ongoing feelings of displacement. This is Lily Dale’s last appearance in the Cycle—she doesn’t return to Harrison in the last play when tragedy comes to the Robedauxs and Vaughns.

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Foote rarely wholly demonizes a character (the only notable exemption being the manager of the cotton gin in “The One-Armed Man”), and he makes no exception with Lily

Dale. While she is possessive of her mother’s attention—even failing to mention that Corella has any other grandchildren besides her own child—she is caring and attentive when her mother is ill, although she is often more concerned about her own fragility than her mother’s. She is also attentive to her stepfather Pete Davenport, who never had any affection for the young Horace. As a fading representation of a southern belle, though, Lily Dale is not without her charms or her irritations. She is a square peg in a round hole—the image of a dying aristocracy attempting to find her way forward as a new woman, rejecting the image of the dutiful housewife and mother, and trying to create her identity as an artist without the sufficient skills to do so. She is truly a woman displaced in 1925. Foote neither dismisses her nor pities her; rather he seems to acknowledge her displacement in a difficult transition—she is like the Harrison economy trying to find its way forward when cotton is no longer king. She, like so many other characters in

Harrison, is the victim of change. And rather than forcing a final opinion on her character, Foote leaves the audience wondering what effects change will have on her and Harrison.

The play closes back in Harrison at Horace’s store—where a drunken Cousin Lewis has kicked the glass out of an expensive hat case, and the rain has washed the cotton crop entirely away: “Let it rain. Now the cotton crop is ruined, let it rain” (78). Again, Foote could easily establish Horace and Elizabeth’s emplacement through a nostalgic affirmation of idyllic small- town life, but he does not. All the cousins finally leave the store and Horace and Elizabeth remain. They kiss, and one might expect the play to end there—finally they are alone, and no amount of family complexity can threaten their stability. But instead an idyllic stability is

169 quickly compromised: Elizabeth reminds Horace that today is Jenny’s birthday, Horace’s aunt

Minnie Curtis (whom he lived with in Houston) enters the store, and a drunken Cousin Lewis returns. Minnie is melancholy during her brief appearance, and she speaks a critical line that seems to encapsulate what Foote is showing in this play: “A family is a remarkable thing, isn’t it? You belong. And then you don’t. It passes you by. Unless you start a family of your own”

(92). Nothing is simple in families, and complexity cannot be escaped. Horace and Elizabeth cannot isolate themselves from their family’s feelings of displacement. Minnie’s comment, intentionally or not, is a subtle indictment of the couple—while Elizabeth and Horace have found their emplacement, Minnie is still trying to find her’s. She no longer belongs because she hasn’t started her own family—her emplacement remains in question in Harrison because she hasn’t ceded to tradition.

Cousin Lewis also appears in the store still drunk and still confessing to the murder of

Cousin Jamie Dale: “The graveyard is full of our cousins. The town is full of them. We’ll be in that graveyard someday, I’ll be there and you’ll be there. Why the graveyard will be full of cousins” (99). Elizabeth and Horace’s emplacement is not concentrically idyllic in an imagined small-town nostalgia where their narrative concludes in a fixed and impenetrable dwelling place.

Instead, their emplacement, in both their house and Horace’s business, is necessarily invaded by the complexity of family and unavoidable loss.

Rather than finally fixing the couple’s emplacement, Foote only heightens the complexity in the final play of the Cycle. The Death of Papa returns the Cycle to Harrison and shifts between the Robedaux house, the Vaughn house, and the graveyard. Gerald C. Wood proposes that the final play returns to many of the same tensions present in the first play: the death of Henry

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Vaughn parallels with the death of Paul Horace, Brother Vaughn’s displacement because of the loss of his father repeats Horace’s displacement when his father dies, and Horace Jr.’s exposure to the complexities of Harrison’s violence and chaos is a repetition of Horace Sr.’s “fall from innocence” (Wood, Intimacy 84). In Foote’s Texas A&M University lecture on his Cycle, he writes most personally about the final play because a character representing him as a nine-year- old boy appears in this play. While the Cycle isn’t strictly autobiographical, Foote uses his family’s stories on which to build his play-cycle. He recounts his childhood memories of the day his grandfather died and its continuing metaphor of inevitable change:

Change, however, was an early acquaintance in my life. My grandfather, who

seemed impervious to all mortal ends, died when I was nine, and the

reverberations and changes from that death continued for many years. Soon after,

I was to see a quiet, serene street (in front of my grandparent’s house) begin its

slow but steady descent into a metaphor for all the ugly, trashy highways that scar

a great deal of small-town America. And these plays, I feel, are about change;

unexpected, unasked for, unwanted, but change to be faced and dealt with or else

we sink into despair or hopeless longing for a life that is gone. (Genesis 134)

Foote laments not just the change of family composition in the death of his grandfather, but the change of place that occurred in Wharton—the declining built places represent the change in what it means to be in place:

My first memory was of stories about the past, a past that, according to the

storytellers, was superior in every way to the life then being lived. It did not take

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me long, however, to understand that the present was all we had, for the past was

gone and nothing could be done about it. (134)

Although he laments the change in the built environment and the displacement it represents, emplacement cannot simply be located in a nostalgic reconstruction of the past. As in August

Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, a recognition of the past is necessary to understand one’s culture and its implications for the present. Jerzy Grotowski’s ideas about the theatre as a place of cultural memory come to mind:

I do not claim that everything we do is entirely new. We are bound, consciously

or unconsciously, to be influenced by the traditions, science and art, even by the

superstitions and presentiments peculiar to the civilisation which has moulded us,

just as we breathe the air of the particular continent which has given us life. All

this influences our undertaking, though sometimes we may deny it. (24)

Cultural memory isn’t a nostalgic reverie for the good old days, but the memory of one’s history as the source of identity and place. In Foote’s final play of the Cycle, emplacement is not found in a nostalgic return to the past, but in the difficult reoccupation and cultivation of the present.

The Death of Papa picks up the narrative in 1928, three years after Cousins. As the play opens, young Horace, Jr. is told of Henry Vaughn’s death—the catalyst for the unraveling of the family’s stability in place. Foote uses African American characters to offer an other-worldly perspective on the circumstances in the play—Eliza, Walter, and Gertrude frame the play by suggesting there are other ways of viewing the culture than the dominant one suggested by the

172 primary characters.44 In Death Foote announces Mr. Vaughn’s passing to the audience through

Eliza’s conversation with Horace Jr.:

Isn’t it terrible? I could have told them, though. I woke up this morning with this

heavy heart, this heart of lead, and I thought what is the matter with you, woman?

You’ve been saved. Your heart should be carefree. And then I looked up and I

seen two mourning doves sitting on the roof of the house. Not one, but two, and I

thought to myself, this is going to be a sad day for us all. “The Lord giveth and

the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” I went for Gertrude and I

told her what I’d seen. I’d no sooner finished telling her this when we heard . . . .

(Death 104)

Eliza’s superstitions about the mourning doves signaling Henry Vaughn’s death combines the spiritual and the material. She notes the deeper spiritual significance signaled in the material world. Foote uses her, and later her brother Walter, to suggest a permeability between the spiritual and the material. Walter has “second sight”—he “saw a fiery chariot in the middle of the road on the way to church” (142). This is the first time in the Cycle that Foote employs characters that blur the line between the spiritual and the material—unlike August Wilson who

44 Rena Fraden in her book Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre 1935-1939 offers an important perspective on the historical tension of creating “authentic” African American characters: “The vogue of the ‘primitive’ Negro, which was articulated and promoted by white culture throughout the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and which lasted into the thirties and beyond, connected the notion of human authenticity with the idea of the primitive. African Americans were said to be more spiritual, more sensual, more natural, more ‘in touch’ with nature, and therefore more authentically human” (15). In The Death of Papa, Foote gives African American women, in particular, the role of articulating a spiritual perspective. However, in his 1982 play, A Young Lady of Property, set only three years before Death in 1925, Minna doesn’t play the “authentic” African American woman who displays second sight. She offers a fairly material perspective—suggesting that Wilma hire an attorney to help her keep her property and reminding the young girl of the importance of her education over more fanciful experiences. Seen together, Eliza and Minna suggest a complexity of voices within Harrison’s African American community.

173 conjoins the two without exception. The African American characters’ matter-of-fact presentation of their second sight and the suggestion that the blurring is commonplace creates a third, conjoint-place between the spiritual and the material—a new place exists in the conjoining of the two.45

There are a number of dichotomies Foote creates within his final play: the spiritual and the material; the Vaughns’ house and the Robedauxs’ house; life and death; Gertrude’s vocational education and Horace, Jr.’s academic education; the future and character of those who read books and those who don’t; Brother’s response to his father’s death, and Horace’s ongoing response to his father’s death. Within these dichotomies, or between them, a third place exists where the two are combined to form something new. The three settings in the play (the two families houses and the cemetery) structurally embody this idea of a third conjoint-place. While the two houses represent two negotiations of place (two dichotomies)—the Robedauxs’ house represents Horace and Elizabeth’s emplacement, and the Vaughns’ house represents Brother’s displacement—the cemetery represents the ongoing uncertainty of emplacement: emplacement in flux. In the cemetery Mrs. Vaughn confronts Brother about his alcoholism and how it threatens to destroy the family’s financial stability. It is where she also confesses her knowledge of Horace’s financial instability, her desire to help, and where Elizabeth rejects her offer of help.

In the cemetery—ironically the final resting place—the reality of the-way-things-are is unearthed. Horace and Brother’s shared ongoing search for stable emplacement are revealed in

45 I am intentionally avoiding Victor Turner’s liminality to describe the third place created in Foote’s work. Turner defines liminal as an in-between space: “when the past is momentarily negated, suspended, or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance” (44). Foote’s third place is not about dwelling in the tension of the liminal—the in-between place—but instead finding a third place that joins the dichotomies.

174 the cemetery where the family goes to visit and cultivate the final resting place of their relatives.

Ultimately Brother will remain displaced because of loss while Horace will find emplacement through loss, but in this third place—that represents a conjoining of the family’s built environments—the characters openly reveal their struggle.

Brother is obsessed with movement—he dismisses the farm hands his father had employed for years and replaces them with people who know nothing about caring for the land; he wants to stop relying upon the cotton crop and gamble on mineral rights and the oil industry; he is unwilling to cultivate what he already owns but would rather throw it away for something new; and when the farm falls into disrepair and he’s gambled away most of his mother’s money, he refuses to fully face his role in the chaos. He’d rather die like his father. He looks for financial security in oil and cars—symbols of movement and modernity—while Horace trades in cotton shirts and insists on walking everywhere. Brother is looking for a commodity that will propel him into the future and protect him from the decline of the cotton crop (a symbol for both the southern aristocracy and the poverty of black and white), but Horace is unwilling to advise his mother-in-law to stop growing cotton—even though Harrison is suffering because of the declining crop. Both Brother and Mrs. Vaughn criticize Horace for his safe business practices:

“Papa always said you’d never have anything because you had not vision and imagination. You were a plodder. Honest and trustworthy, but not smart” (137). The Vaughns are critical of

Horace because he is a “plodder”—his rootedness, which provides stability, has financial consequences. But Brother’s movement also has financial consequences. By the end of the

Cycle, all his attempts at figuring out how to break away from the past—the cotton crops and his father’s way of doing business—have caused him to lose nearly all his family’s money. His

175 impulsive mismanagement and his search for a quick profit have resulted in the same financial instability Horace is experiencing. But Horace retains his stability because of his rootedness in place, whereas Brother loses his stability and remains displaced.46

As with Lily Dale, Foote doesn’t allow the audience to dismiss Brother entirely despite his gross mismanagement of his place. He’s stuck in the culture’s transition: no longer a respected member of the declining southern aristocracy and still undervalued as a modern man whose future is uncertain—“Times are changing, Mama” (Death 133). The only way Brother feels emplaced is while moving: “Do you remember the time I went to Germany on the boat? I liked that. I like traveling. I think I would like to be a merchant seaman. . . . I’d like to go around the world” (165). Elizabeth’s suggestion that he “meet a nice girl and settle down and have a family” is no solution to his displacement—he must seek emplacement in exile from home (165).

Brother is not unlike Tom in Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. Tom also seeks emplacement and adventure elsewhere, away from the symbol of a dying southern aristocracy, his mother Amanda Wingfield—anywhere else than the tiny Saint Louis apartment and his cloyingly abusive mother. Tom is a dreamer. He escapes the prison his mother has created and goes to the movies nightly where he imagines a life far different from one in the tiny apartment and at the warehouse where he works. He gets “fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoe- box,” and, like Brother, begins his incessant movement to escape his memories (96). Brother dreams of leaving the small town that can no longer provide a place for him because he hopes to

46 It seems consequential that Foote writes about the false stability found in oil and the loss of stability in cotton at the end of the 1970’s energy crisis. Foote acknowledges the affects of the energy crisis on his writing when he was holed up during the snowy New England winter of 1974: “my family and I kept warm by using our fireplaces and wood stoves” (Genesis 117). Naturally, his thoughts were turned to the economic instability of oil.

176 find an adventure that will give him purpose and identity—something to replace his role in a crumbling aristocracy. The great tragedy of Brother’s life is that he is destined to wander as an impotent dreamer abandoned by a society that no longer has a place for him. His presumed role as a southern landowner and pillar of society no longer exists. His dreams are his only solace, and even those are obstructed by his destructive behavior: his inability to confront reality. As the

Cycle closes and Brother returns home briefly after murdering a man in an inebriated fight in

Houston, he reveals the struggle between Horace’s rooted emplacement and his own need to live as an exile: “Maybe one day I’ll be able to come back. This is my home, but I can’t live in my home. I have to wander . . . because that’s what I feel I’ll be doing. I told Mama I’m going to

Dallas to start a business, but I’ll never stay in Dallas” (194). Brother is unable to find a place in

Harrison’s crumbling present because, like Lily Dale, he is unwilling to face the reality of his circumstances.

Although Horace is set up as a parallel to Brother in his emplacement, Horace also experiences restlessness. For the first time in the Cycle, Foote allows Horace to express his discomfort in Harrison—his desire to be an exile:

HORACE SR. I wish I could just pick up and leave. I wish I could travel to

California.

HORACE JR. Why?

HORACE SR. Because I’m sick and tired of people and their curiosity. They

always come to me when they want to find out something about the Vaughns.

They nearly drove me crazy after Mr. Vaughn’s death trying to find out the size of

his estate, and then when Brother was in charge—every time he was drunk

177

someone would come by the store to let me know he knew Brother wasn’t

attending to his father’s business. Tomorrow I’ll have fifty visitors with a million

questions. (182)

Horace has finally had enough. His constant struggle to keep his business open, and the ongoing small-town gossip and small-mindedness push him to imagine a life outside of Harrison—to flee his place in order to seek a new stability. Horace’s restlessness is the catalyst for him to speak frankly to his mother for the first time in the Cycle. Corella is concerned about all the reading

Horace Jr. is doing: “I tell you what worries me. Seeing that child with his nose stuck in a book constantly. Which I was here last time I reminded you about Terrence Robedaux” (189).

Terrence was the ill-fated bother of Horace’s father who spent his time reading Latin and Greek to the irritation of Horace’s mother and her family—they blamed his death on his interest in learning. Horace finally answers his mother’s concerns over Horace Jr.’s “overeducation”:

CORELLA. I think overeducation is a curse. I can name you boy after boy that

were overeducated like Terrence Robedaux and weren’t worth killing.

HORACE SR. And I can name you boy after boy whose family had no interest at

all in them or what they learned. Who no one cared if they went to school or if

they didn’t. What they had to bear, what they had . . . And those boys . . . most of

them . . . a great many of them, are not worth much today either . . . And some of

them that did survive have to work like dogs to make ends meet and to make up

for their total lack of education. I could tell you heart-breaking stories, too, about

those boys. And if I have to choose between the two for my son . . . I will choose .

. .

178

(WALTER comes in.)

CORELLA. Elizabeth, I swear I didn’t mean a thing in this world. He is so

sensitive. I swear I don’t know why he is so sensitive. (189)

In the tension between his impulse for exile and his stability of place in Elizabeth, their house, and Harrison, Horace finds the courage to finally tell his mother how she displaced him in Roots.

Horace is able to speak frankly in the moment between emplacement and displacement. The play draws quickly to a close after Horace’s outburst.

As the Cycle closes, Brother displays his frustrated nostalgia for his lost place in

Harrison. His nostalgia (a symptom of displacement according to Casey) is both the cause and result of his displacement from Harrison. He refuses to take on the difficult responsibility of rootedness that would require him to acknowledge his own chaos and violence because he has a distorted nostalgia for Harrison’s past—he mythologizes the respect his father received from the town. Because he doesn’t receive the same respect, he refuses to take responsibility for his land—land which becomes the cause of his displacement. But he also has a distorted nostalgia because of his displacement: “He loves this place. He loves his home. He said to me just now:

‘Mama, what is wrong with me? I love my home. Why can’t I live on here?’ And he talks all the time now about his papa” (193). Because he is exiled from his place, he has the luxury (and the illness) of nostalgia. His only way forward is to live as a frustrated dreamer.

Horace reaffirms Harrison as the site of his emplacement, but Foote suggests this isn’t final:

BROTHER. I used to feel so sorry for you when you would come and call on

Elizabeth. I’d hear Papa and Mama talking and they said you were practically an

179

orphan and had no home. Now you have a home and I don’t. I expect someday

you’ll even be living in my home while I’m wandering around the world.

HORACE SR. No, I won’t. This is my home.

BROTHER. Don’t be so sure. Don’t be too sure about anything, big Horace. Not

about anything in this world.

(They continue on as the lights fade.) (194)

For Foote, emplacement is the ongoing negotiation of the tensions between stability and instability, rootedness and exile, certainty and uncertainty. It exists in the comingling of two places: the concentric and the eccentric. Rather than reinforcing a dichotomy of emplacement,

Foote completes the Cycle by suggesting it is often in flux, and consistently under threat by the realities of modern life. Wood observes that “according to Foote, twentieth-century anxiety results from the physical and emotional dislocation produced by modern American life”

(Intimacy 16). For Foote, displacement results from the modern dismissal of the past and resulting nostalgia, the preoccupation with rapid movement, and the self-isolation that results from an inability to face the chaos.

The last play of the Cycle solves this dislocation, not by suggesting a final, permanent emplacement, but an ongoing, complex emplacement. For Foote’s characters, emplacement is not found by choosing a side between certainty and uncertainty, but by having a direct experience of the chaos. Lily Dale shelters herself in a house filled with material objects easily misinterpreted as place-making, but all her stuff is a barrier against the realities of her past—she uses her house as a way to forcibly resist the chaos, and is, therefore, not emplaced. Brother is in exile from his dwelling place, both putting himself in the path of the chaos and participating in

180 it—he wanders in order to avoid the consequences of the chaos he creates and is, therefore, not emplaced. Neither fearful isolation nor chaotic wandering is the answer to displacement. Horace and Elizabeth allow the chaos to enter their house—they invite it in. In doing so, they experience it first hand; and while it challenges their stability in place, their dwelling place provides safety:

“As Foote’s characters confront unsought change, these houses—whether old or new—offer a crucial sense of safety” (13). Safety that allows for and embraces change—even change in the actual built environment of Harrison, Texas.47

For the audience at a performance of Foote’s The Orphans’ Home Cycle, the play-cycle structure itself requires that they negotiate their emplacement. If finding one’s place in a built environment requires “repeated return” to a built structure and through reoccupation the place begins to “possess a certain felt familiarity,” then the theatre where a play-cycle is performed has the characteristics for emplacement (Casey 115). Marvin Carlson begins his book on the semiotics of the built theatre environment with the question: “How do theatres mean?”

Essentially he is asking how does the form of the theatre place affect the content and meaning of the theatrical event, and alternately how does the content affect the form? While his book Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (1989) addresses the meanings created by the theatre’s architecture—the city itself, the theatre’s location in the city, and its interior and exterior decoration—his opening question is an important one to this discussion of place-making within the content of a drama and how that iterates itself in the form. Stark Young is making a

47 Samuel G. Freedman identifies Foote’s concern with change in the built structures of his hometown: “Foote is preoccupied with change, with the erosion of tradition and identity. He has seen it in Wharton, where franchises, tract houses and garden apartments spill across the cotton fields while the old downtown corrodes” (Introduction xvi).

181 similar assertion when he says, “The supreme thing in the theatre is the arrival of the work of art in which we perceive that an idea has found a theatrical body to bring it into existence” (The

Theatre 58). The play-cycle accomplishes fitness of form and content, explored by both Aristotle and Martin Esslin, through its aesthetic of place. Both the content and the form of the play-cycle encourage emplacement.

The American play-cycle attempts to cure displacement in its content; it also encourages emplacement through its extensive form. Foote uses the built environment as a metaphor for emplacement in his narrative, but he also uses the extended form of the play-cycle to encourage emplacement in the built structure of the theatre itself. His Cycle and the theatre place both repeat his aesthetic of place. A performance of the nine-play Cycle requires that the audience reoccupy, become familiar with the theatre, and reencounter the characters in various stages of their development. The time it takes to view the Cycle invites the audience to struggle along with the characters. Foote immerses the audience in the characters’ chaos, and gives them the choice to share in it or isolate from it—to face their own individual displacement. In his place-making

Cycle he recovers “the meaningfulness of particular places” where the theatre audience can

“emerge into a larger world of burgeoning experience, not only by ourselves but with others”

(Driver 463, Casey 111). To be emplaced in Foote’s Harrison one must invite the chaos and experience the theatre’s ritual with a community of the displaced.

CHAPTER 4

COMING FULL CIRCLE: THE PLAY-CYCLE COMES INTO PLACE

So there he lay at rest, the storm-tossed great Odysseus, borne down by his hard labors first and now deep sleep as Athena traveled through the countryside and reached the Phaeacians’ city. Years ago they lived in a land of spacious dancing-circles, Hyperia, all too close to the overbearing Cyclops, stronger, violent brutes who harried them without end. So their godlike king, Nausithous, led the people off in a vast migration, settled them in Scheria, far from the men who toil on this earth— he flung up walls around the city, built the houses, raised the gods’ temples and shared the land for plowing.

—Homer, The Odyssey

WESTON. What do you think of this place? EMMA. The house? WESTON. The whole thing. The whole fandango! The orchard! The air! The night sky!

—Sam Shepard, Curse of the Starving Class

In Sarah Ruhl’s opening essay to Passion Play she identifies several defining characteristics of the play-cycle. First she suggests, as both Sparks and Andreach do, that the three plays together and the three plays separately are two different kinds of theatre events:

“Together, the three parts form a cycle play—alone, they do something different, but they can technically stand alone” (10). As Kolve suggests, the play-cycle’s “single coherent dramatic

182 183 intent” is different than the individual play’s dramatic purpose (50). Ruhl, however, also suggests the importance of place for both the theatre and the play-cycle:

It’s easy to feel powerless as the great political wheels turn, financed by enormous

wealth. But then you get to thinking about what starts every grass-roots

revolution—people organizing in one room. Luckily that very special right is

protected by our Constitution. And as ill-suited as some theater artists are to some

meanings of the word “organization,” there is one thing all of us tend to do well,

and that is to organize people to come to one room. It is not that the play you are

about to read is a political treatise—not at all—but it does provide us with another

occasion to be in one room together as we continue to meditate on the relationship

of community to political icons. And to meditate on what we can do to affect

change in very solemn times indeed. (9)

Ruhl’s reflection on the state of American politics and American theatre is really a reflection on the power of the theatre to make a place—to bring people together into a commonplace allowing them to ruminate on who they are in relationship to one another and to society. The play-cycle has the unique ability to accomplish this on a much larger scale: to extend the theatre’s pause (in time) in order to root us to our community (in place). In our ever-growing technopolis the play- cycle has the effect of bringing place back into focus because place is the primary aesthetic of the theatre. Within this protracted pause that leads to a heightened significance of place the play- cycle often evaluates matters of great concern to the community—family, sexuality, religion, government, myths, and core values: matters that can be more thoroughly explored through an extended cycle form that harnesses the audience to place. The audience is required to see—to

184 look from their place in the theatron down into the ancient dancing circle where the ongoing complexity of humanity is played out.

Both August Wilson and Horton Foote accomplish this in their epic works of theatre.

While Wilson is not traditionally considered a southern playwright, both he and Foote are concerned with what has become a hallmark of southern writers such as Tennessee Williams,

Eudora Welty, Lillian Hellman, Romulus Linney, Marsha Norman, Flannery O’Connor, and

William Faulkner—a concern with place. Laurin Porter even suggests that the litmus test for southern writers is whether or not they demonstrate this concern (190). While it is obvious to many scholars that Foote employs this southern aesthetic, it is not so well documented in the scholarship on Wilson’s work. Both playwrights approach this stereotypical southern aesthetic from different directions. Wilson’s play-cycle doesn’t take place in the South, but his characters desire a return they embody through the food they eat—not a return to the place’s hostile cultural legacy but, instead, to the memory of belonging to the land and the food they brought with them from Africa and the culture of food preparation they refined in the American South. They long for acknowledgement that, in large part, they were responsible for the health of the land and the richness of the culture from which they had to flee—a lost culture that has left them displaced.

They long for the complexity of emplacement rather than the simplification of their identity brought about by their odyssey north. Foote’s play-cycle, while certainly taking place in the

South (although not the old Deep South), contains characters that long for an escape from their small town—or, at the very least, a prolonged odyssey. The ruined crops, the dying small town, and the disintegrating families are all displacing catalysts that make them want to flee to the coast or to urban areas further north. They desire to abandon their small-town memories and

185 identity and move to Houston where they can become lost and shrouded in American consumer culture—to trade the complexity of emplacement for the simplicity of anonymity.

These two important American playwrights of place, however, are not alone in their aesthetic expressions of American displacement and emplacement. Wilson and Foote’s play- cycles demonstrate an aesthetic of place that repeats itself elsewhere in the American theatre beginning with the treaties made between white settlers and Native Americans recorded in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Constance Rourke in her 1942 history of American aesthetics The Roots of American Culture deems these transcriptions the first expression of the

American theatre: “They are in truth our first American plays” (64). But Rourke goes beyond identifying them as the first American dramas; they are the first American play-cycles:

Some fifty of these treaties are known to have been printed: their cycle has epic

proportions as well as an epic theme. In the exact sense they are incomparable;

nothing like them exists in our own literature or any other. . . . These products of

two races were poetry of a high order. In their own time they had a wide currency

not only because of their political significance but for their rich episodes, their

bold portraiture, their singular fragments of human history. . . . That the treaties

could be matched in poetic or imaginative values by individual effort in their own

time was hardly to be expected: they were traditional, communal, they expressed

values that had long been accumulated. They were part of an evolving sequence

that was to endure long past the period of the Revolution. (63-64)

This epic play-cycle is a tragedy of native people displaced from their land and forced westward.

It establishes the cycles of displacement that represent the American expression of the play-cycle

186 form. Like the transcripts of the treaties, Rourke also identifies the “burlesque” folktales about

Davey Crockett as early expressions of an American cycle in her book American Humor: A

Study of the National Character (60). The tall tales of “The Gamecock of the Wilderness” (that seem to be resurrected and critiqued in Robert Shenkkan’s Kentucky Cycle)

approached the realm of the epic, not merely because of the persistent effect of

scale or because of their theme of wandering adventure, but because they

embodied something of those interwoven destinies of gods and men which have

made the great epical substance. (60)

According to Rourke, this American Odyssey sees its hero on a cycle of place-oriented adventures in what was then the Southwest, “reaching beyond the Mississippi as the scout and huntsman and pioneer moved from his first base of the dark and bloody ground” (61). The

“content” of the stories “was the wilderness with its impenetrable depths, the wild storms of the

West, the great rivers, the strange new wonders on every side” (49). These two formative cycles—one easily defined as a play-cycle and the other a folk epic in the spirit of Homer’s

Odyssey—are early American aesthetic expressions of an ongoing concern with displacement and emplacement. The former tells an unfolding story of a native people systematically displaced from their sacred lands, and the latter of a wandering, backwoods hero moving from wild place to wild place—a panoramic vision of American place. Both explore American mythology, folklore, and the birth of the American character.

The American theatre is littered with play-cycles worth navigating that further develop these early expressions of an aesthetic of place. Like The Orphans’ Home Cycle and the

Pittsburgh Cycle, some are more obviously concerned with local communities in the throes of

187 displacement, while others make the theatre itself the site of emplacement. Robert Schenkkan’s

The Kentucky Cycle explores the two hundred-year history of a piece of Kentucky soil and the people that become growingly displaced from it through exploitation. Suzan-Lori Parks’ 2014 play-cycle Father Comes Home from the Wars—The Measure of a Man, A Battle in the

Wilderness, The Union of My Confederate Parts—follows the odyssey of an enslaved African

American man, Hero (later renamed Ulysses), as he travels with his owner into the Civil War.

Like Wilson’s characters, Hero is displaced to begin with, becomes further displaced in the second play, and ends up displacing his fellow slaves when he returns home to west Texas in the final play. Preston Jones, like Foote, also explores the displacing affects of small-town Texas life in his play-cycle The Texas Trilogy—The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia

(1973), Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander (1974), and The Oldest Living Graduate (1974).

Like Harrison in Foote’s plays, Bradleyville is Jones’ fictitious small west-Texas town that has its share of eccentrics, racists, and criminals the playwright uses to expose the mythos of small- town life. Lanford Wilson’s Talley Trilogy—Fifth of July (1978), Talley’s Folly (1979), and

Talley & Son (1985)—tells a local story of a dysfunctional family in Lebanon, Missouri. The play-cycle shows the human extremes of the small-town family: the displacing effects of the

Vietnam War, the shift from a rural economy to an industrial economy after World War I, and the strained intimacies of human relationships. Tony Kushner’s award-winning play-cycle

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes—Millennium Approaches (1990) and

Perestroika (1991)—while epic in scope involving many locales and thirty-three characters is about a community in crisis during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, more specifically about the displacement of two young men reeling from the crisis. The men are displaced from their

188 communities—the gay community, the Jewish community, and the Mormon community— because of AIDS and ultimately find their place in the rootedness of intimate human relationships. Eugene O’Neill’s three-part Mourning Becomes Electra (1931)—Homecoming,

The Hunted, and The Haunted—doesn’t feel as localized as the other play-cycles under discussion (or as localized as his friend Susan Glaspell’s plays) but it still retains its concern with a family and their place—in this instance (as in Desire Under the Elms) the house and the land.

O’Neill’s preoccupation with his characters’ “belonging” suggests they have lost their emplacement, or maybe never had it to begin with:

They are men of heroic stature determined to find in the universe something

besides themselves to which they can belong and be loyal. They are, in other

words, tragic heroes. “Behind the smaller themes of all my plays,” so O’Neill

once wrote, “lies a larger theme, namely, that sickness of today which is caused

by man’s loss of religion and his need to find some substitute for it.” Or as in a

conversation he once remarked: “I am not interested in plays which are merely

about the relation of man to man. I am interested in nothing except the relation of

man to God.” (Krutch 118)

O’Neill uses the Mannon’s estate—a looming, Greek structure—as the image of the American family seeking emplacement in opulent built structures, even while they despise them in their search for belonging elsewhere. The playwright suggests through the narrative and the setting that they’ve become displaced from their God and replaced him with mammon. Like Wilson and

Foote, these playwrights write play-cycles to explore the relationships of characters to their local soil—the land, the community, and the built structures they frequent and inhabit.

189

Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play (2005), while also addressing the relationship of people to their local community, is more reflective on the place of the theatre itself. The trilogy is made up of three parts set in three different locales and times: an English village in 1575, Oberammergau,

Bavaria in 1934, and Spearfish, South Dakota from 1969 to the present. The setting is the preparation and performance of a Passion play in each place and time—a play within a play.

Ruhl opens each part with a prologue spoken by the Chorus announcing the place: “We make our play in England. / In the North / By the sea / In the open air of England”; “Oberammergau, 1934!

/ The Passion Play’s three hundred year anniversary”; and “Spearfish, South Dakota, 1969! /

Picture red earth / dead tribes / knickknacks, ghost towns” (15, 59, 105). The play-cycle has a doubling of place: the towns are a place where the performers in the Passion plays form a community, and the theatre itself is a place where the actors and the audience form a community—both the theatre in the play-cycle and the theatre in which Passion Play is performed. Ruhl’s aesthetic of place is of emplacement in the theatre and emplacement in the

English and German villages or small-town America. The whole community—the actors, audience, village, and theatre—are on the odyssey of emplacement: a “grass-roots revolution— people organizing in one room” (9).

Sam Shepard’s Family Trilogy, Curse of the Starving Class (1977), Buried Child (1978), and True West (1980), introduces a set of plays organized into a play-cycle by an outside source.

In his 1986 article in The Theatre Annual, “American Gothic: Sam Shepard’s Family Trilogy,”

Rodney Simard identifies Shepard’s three plays as a trilogy because of “the shift from simply presenting a dramatic experience to dramatizing the same sort of experience” (23). These three plays “rely more on objective reality as a framework” than his previous plays (21). Shepard’s

190 aesthetic of place is the chaos of place—land, houses, and the body are essentially no-place. In the play-cycle his characters’ inhabit built structures that spiral into chaos. For Shepard every outside place seems to be a desert. Both California and Illinois farmland become the apocalyptic world of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame. Shepard creates an outside world nearly impossible to imagine—no emissary of emplacement comes from the outside, only more displaced persons. The result is the characters’ search for something to cure the displacement:

“Shepard’s typically displaced man; belonging nowhere, he drinks and disappears for stretches of time” (24). But emplacement is elusive:

A world of discards and throwaways, of nostalgie de boue appeased by

landscapes filled with detritus and interiors strewn with debris, of floating images,

unfinished acts, discontinuity and dissonance, abruptness and illogicalities; and

impatience with time for proceeding instead of existing all at once, like space; and

with space for having limits, fixed contours and finality. (Gilman xv)

Shepard’s deserts, while real locales in his play-cycle, represent “the pathos of rootless existence” (xx). No one can find a place in the desert: not in the farmer’s shack without doors, the Illinois farmhouse littered with dead bodies, or the suburban-house turned theatre-of-war on the edge of the desert. In this cacophony of place Shepard’s characters find their emplacement in their role—in the theatre where they have come to be seen. Like Sarah Ruhl, Shepard acknowledges the theatre itself as the site of emplacement; unlike Ruhl, Shepard’s characters don’t come to create community, they come to be the spectacle pursuing the American Dream.

Edward Casey ends his discussion of the means of emplacement in late modern society by returning to the first epic cycle in western literature, Homer’s Odyssey. The cycle is “as much

191 a narrative of place as it is a narrative of events. It is a narrative of events in place” (277).

Odysseus’ journey washes him up on the shore of Scheria, an isolated, walled city the god-king

Nausithous built for his people when they escaped from their homeland in the shadow of the menacing Cyclops. Their new homeland is idyllic, pastoral, opulent, isolated, and (most importantly) safe. They no longer fear the Cyclops. But they lost something in their displacement from their homeland Hyperia, “a land of spacious dancing-circles” (168). There in the tensions between beauty and chaos their homeland boasted spacious dancing-circles where stories were told that brought the community into a prolonged, place-making pause. They lost the theatre.

Wilson, Foote, and other writers of play-cycles acknowledge through their work that the theatre exists in these tensions between safety and chaos, and that emplacement often occurs under the shadow of the Cyclops.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Erin Lea Naler was born in Kansas City, Missouri. She completed a Bachelor of Science in

Speech Education and a Master of Art in Theatre Arts from Bob Jones University. She has directed and performed in a number of plays from the classics to new works, and has taught directing and theatre history. She is a founding member of the Paper Napkin Theatre Company in

Greenville, South Carolina. In August 2009 she began attending The Graduate School at The

University of Texas at Dallas

201

CURRICULUM VITAE

ERIN LEA NALER 1700 Wade Hampton Blvd Greenville, South Carolina 29617

Experience

• Instructor, Theatre Arts, Bob Jones University (2014-2016) • Special Project, Playwriting Competition, The University of Texas at Dallas, Diversity and Community Involvement Office (2012-13) • Drama Camp and Shakespeare Camp Instructor (Summer 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010) • Transcriber, English Broadside Ballad Archive (2011-12) • Faculty Member, Dramatic Arts, Bob Jones University (2000-2010) • New Student Relations and Student Orientation, Longview Community College (1999- 2000)

CONFERENCES/PAPERS

• Essay presented at the introduction of the 2016-17 Theatre Arts Season—A Season of American Place • Essay presented at the introduction to the 2015-16 Theatre Arts Season—The Outer Shore: A Season of Creative Women—“The Outer Shore” • Costal Plains Graduate Conference on Language and Literature—"Creating in the Margins: Creativity and Iteration in Susan Glaspell's Play The Outside" (Spring 2014) • Research and Writing (RAW) Symposium, University of Texas at Dallas "Epic [A]esthetics: Of Gods, Airplanes, and Spinning Stages" (2013) • Conference on the Christian Evasion of Popular Culture, Dordt College—“Anatomy of Confession: Dexter Morgan and Father Logan” (Fall 2012) • Research and Writing (RAW) Symposium, University of Texas at Dallas “Vivid Community: The Pie Town, New Mexico Photographs of Russell Lee” (Spring 2012) • South Eastern Theatre Conference—“The Theater Artist as Image Bearer and Creator” (Spring 2012) • South Eastern Theatre Conference—“Romancing Integrity: Adapting Faith Narratives for the Theater” (Spring 2011)

PUBLICATION

“Image Bearing in the Creative Process”—Today’s Christian Woman (a Christianity Today publication) October 2013

STAGE DIRECTION/PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT AND CREATION

• Doris Fisher Harris Playwriting Festival Showcase play—Some Fell Among Thorns—directing and design (2010) • Paradise Lost—film, music, live performance development, creation and direction (2010)

ASSISTANT DIRECTION

• Henry V—Classic Players (2000) • Revelation—National Communication Association Performance (2000) • Twelfth Night—Classic Players (1998) • Oedipus Rex (1998) • Our Derby Sweepstakes (1996)

PERFORMANCE

• Hamlet—Gertrude (Spring 2016) • Wales Outside the Window—Lilly (Spring 2015) • Southern Methodist University student film class—“Happiness” (2011) • A Winter’s Tale (2010)—Hermione • Cor Mium (2009) • Here is Love, Vast as the Ocean (2009)—Narrator • They Hear the Distant Thunder (2008)

MISCELLANEOUS

• Member Phi Kappa Phi academic honor society. • Development and Planning Theatre Arts season and Gala—A Season of American Plays (Fall 2016) • Summer Interdisciplinary Honors Program development grant (Summer 2016) • Developing and Planning Theatre Arts season and Gala—The Outer Shore: A Season of Creative Women (Fall 2015) • Interdisciplinary Course Creation Grant—Incarnation and the Humanities (Fall 2015) • Drama/Shakespeare Camp Staff (Summer 2012, 2011, 2010, 2007) • Doris Fisher Harris Playwriting Competition Bake-off Assistant Coordinator • Operation Renewed Hope Medical Missions Trip—Peru (Summer 2009)

Education

PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas—ABD Humanities in Aesthetics Studies Completed comprehensive exams with distinction. Teaching Fields: • American theater • Directing and acting theory • Twentieth century, American, social documentary photography M. A. Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina—May 1999 Dramatic Production (Directing) B. S. Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina—May 1997 Major: Speech Education (Dramatic Production) Minor: English

Courses Taught

Appreciation of Theatre and Film (ThA 225) Portfolio Preparation (ThA 401) American Theatre History Survey (ThA 601) Incarnation and the Humanities (Bi 415/ThA 415) Stage Directing (ThA 300) Theatre History and Literature I and II (ThA 105; ThA 205) Introduction to the Arts (FA 125) Introduction to Theatre (DP 200) Stagecraft (DP 303) Theatre Arts Practicum (DP 305)